Sunday, May 13, 2007

Contradictory Nature

After reading Camus' The Rebel many years ago I was struck by the contradictory balance Camus imposes on the concepts of justice and freedom. Camus was arguing that no one could legitimize murder and used the examples of revolutionaries and rebels to illustrate his point. Particularly with the French Revolution, murder was frequently employed in the name of preservation of the state. Absolute justice is what Camus called it. At the same time, Camus points to the surrealists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to note how absolute freedom leads to the same murderous result. At either extreme you have an absolute Yes or an absolute No. For the man who says Yes to everything he cannot then deny someone the right to murder. For the man who says No to everything murder becomes the best means to ensure that all laws are followed. Of course, Camus doesn't buy any of this. Instead, Camus argues that either extreme leads to a moral and logical fallacy. To say Yes or No to everything is to say its opposite as well. It's a tautology where Yes=No and No=Yes because there isn't any discernible difference between the two at that point. You need the ability to say Yes or No. In other words, you need a value system.
With the concepts of justice and freedom, Camus argues that you must maintain both, for freedom without justice is anarchy where everything is permitted and justice without freedom is tyranny where nothing is permitted. It's this contradictory balance that I find fascinating. For the human condition, this contradiction is one of those subtle ways that I believe one can witness the divine. I don't believe that nature or physics is contradictory. And yet, we have minds that continually uncover contradictions. Our minds hold both rational and irrational thoughts, our lives are filled with logical and illogical aspects, and we are still able to get up in the morning. For physics, there are instances of apparent contradictions but I believe this is simply an example of where our minds can't quite cope with the concept. The wave-particle duality of light, the Schrödinger's Cat question, the very idea of virtual particles, all of these examples are instances of apparent contradictions but they do have rules and logic.
The whole point of these apparent contradictions, the contradictory balance that Camus strikes between freedom and justice, is that our minds can only deal with so much. My personal belief is that such contradictions are necessary in the Wittgensteinian sense of showing the fly the way out of the flybottle. They are ways to break us out of our natural human logic and see something differently.

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