Stolen Quotation
''For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction.'' -- St. Thomas Aquinas
This is the official "corner quote" on Disputations, one of the sites that Ernesto has linked to from Detente. (I've got to find out how to create links here, to balance out the list with some evangelical blogs.) Anyway, I liked the quote, but I'm not sure I understand it. What exactly is resistance to a contradiction? Still it seemed like something that belonged here on Detente, so I stole it.
This is the official "corner quote" on Disputations, one of the sites that Ernesto has linked to from Detente. (I've got to find out how to create links here, to balance out the list with some evangelical blogs.) Anyway, I liked the quote, but I'm not sure I understand it. What exactly is resistance to a contradiction? Still it seemed like something that belonged here on Detente, so I stole it.
posted by Rick Broussard at 10:21 PM
4 Comments:
Here's my take on it...
One process for resolving a contradiction is to pick it apart into pieces, and solve the pieces. If some of the pieces are false, then we have to call the contradiction false. Perhaps we misunderstand it - it just seems a contradiction because we don't know any better? I think that is often the case.
And, I also believe in mystery. Everything within us may tell us something is true, but maybe we can't prove it from a logical perspective. It's a mystery; and I think it's healthy to accept mystery.
Regarding Ecumenism... it's the same Christ that lives in each of us. He can not be divided, but he can be misinterpreted and filtered by our own denominational lenses. Denominations & churches are self-preserving; they have a high level of motivation to justify their correctness, their existence. We each think our is the more-correct version. But do we also realize that each is imperfect and incomplete?
So, Steve, (nice to meet you, by the way) are you saying that Aquinas is recommending that we embrace the mystery within a contradiction, or is he advising us to pick it apart? My first thought was that the quotation was an admonition to resist the very existence of a contradiction and to find truth in reconciling its internal struggle, but "resist" suggests that the contradiction itself is somehow aggressive, like a bad viral meme. Maybe it's some archaic meaning of the word "resist" that makes this statement hard for me to fathom.
BTW I agree with your comment on ecumenism. I guess that systems of a certain complexity have to become self-sustaining and self-justifying, just as a stack of blocks has to interlock and rise to a point or else collapse into a heap. It's up to the individual blocks within the stack to remain humble, no matter how big or ornate their pile becomes.
Rick - Perhaps we can do both: pick apart the contradiction and embrace mystery. I don't think they are mutually exclusive.
By seeking ways to resolve a contradiction, that's a way of resisting it.
Or, I could be full or hot air on this too. I'm not a big Thomist. I am a systematic thinker, but definitely not a theologian or philosopher. Based on my life experience though, contradictions are not always what the may seem to be at first glance. And, life is full of mystery - things we know to be true but can't explain.
Interesting takes on that quote from both of you.
My first instinct is to wonder how exactly Aquinas meant "contradiction." Did he mean it in the sense of "opposition of two ideas" or more in the sense of logic, a necessarily false statement?
In either sense, if the statements are logically incompatible, and one is true, then the other one is either false or, as Steve pointed out, we must have misunderstood it. But, if the problem is our misunderstanding, then the statements aren’t really contradictory, and so this really doesn’t apply, right?
The way I might take Aquinas' statement would be to assume it means that "the only way to discover truth is to assume that there is such a thing as truth and that it is discoverable."
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