Over the years I’ve become aware that at a certain stage of life for most of us, some ideas and controlling metaphors begin to “settle in,” and one finds them reappearing in varying incarnations—the same forms in different dress, the same themes with different melodies. One of those themes that keeps popping up in my life is the notion of paradox: the concept that apparently opposite or contradictory ideas can provide a profound glimpse into the truth of things.

I offer these reflections on the notion of paradox in part as a commentary on my introduction of it on the “Home” page of my blog and because those who may choose to follow my blog posts from time to time will see this idea “pop up” on a fairly regular basis. It’s the reason I chose to use the term “Boundaries” in the title of my blog site and the reason paradoxes—diversity and community, accountability and “the magic of the unexpected,” the individual and the community, the student and the teacher—have been embedded in each of my first four posts.

This notion is something I first learned from Harry Emerson Fosdick, who spoke of mature Christian living as learning to “live under the ceaseless tension of opposites.” The idea has resurfaced for me many times over the years. Ronald Hepburn’s book, Christianity and Paradox, which I read in a graduate seminar in the early 60s, replanted this termite in my brain, where it was nurtured by countless writers—in readings on the developmental stages of life by Sheehy, Erickson, Kohlberg, Gilligan; a host of readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology—especially Paul Tillich, with his unique, narrowly precise definition and pervasive use of the concept; by the inevitable dialectic of philosophical conversation; and perhaps most poignantly in an address by the late John Claypool, who argued that the “challenge of maturity” is learning to live with paradox—learning not to absolutize one side of a matter at the expense of all others. All of these confirmed what I have come to believe is a profound idea.

And so, for most of my adult life, I have been an unrepentant misfit—a “both-and kind” of guy in an increasingly “either-or” world, with the tendency to see opposites and then try to find some way to hold them together. I am not discounting, at all, the reality that we are sometimes confronted with forced choices when the necessity to “take sides” is fraught with moral or existential obligation. That said, this notion that paradox can provide a profound glimpse into the truth of things has been an integral part of my thinking for more than forty years, stimulated by the persistent reminders of all those either/ors that we need to hold together in that delicate balance of the paradoxical—teaching and learning, theory and practice, self and other, personal and public, intellect and feeling, reason and intuition—and you can grow the list yourself.

An example of the way this notion can “pop up” in unexpected ways occurred when I played the role—in two productions almost twenty years apart—of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. In this legendary musical theatre creation, whose entertainment value is matched by a substantive plot and authentic historical context, I was confronted and fascinated by this character’s frequent reflections on his life and family dilemmas embraced by the phrases “on the one hand” and “on the other hand,” and by his conversations with himself as he struggled with how to resolve these apparent impasses by finding a “middle ground” that did not require choosing “either/or”—the classic quandary of the paradoxical “on the stage.”

The importance of the notion of paradox came home to me anew twice several years ago. The first—again, ironically, in theatre literature—was playing the role of Niels Bohr in the play, Copenhagen. Some of you may know of the play—which ran in London and New York and won several awards, including the Tony in 2000 for Best Broadway Play—but I confess I had not heard of it until I was offered this role. When I read it, I was intrigued because the playwright, Michael Frayn, reimagines the historic and mysterious meeting in Copenhagen in 1941 between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The story was a reminder of the way these old friends had revolutionized atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, both of which had been a part of my research and teaching in the philosophy of science.

I do not pretend to understand the mathematics or the finer points of physics, but reading the play brought back to me my longtime fascination with the “wave-particle duality” that quantum mechanics introduced into our understanding of the physical universe at its most fundamental level—sometimes it behaves like particles, sometimes like waves and, as Bohr said, experiments can show one or the other but not both at the same time. Yet sacrificing either characteristic at the expense of the other impoverishes our understanding of the world.
As Eric Rust, my major professor in graduate school, used to say, “We treat matter like a particle on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, like a wave on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and on Sunday we go to church and pray about it.” So if even at the heart of material reality, we must embrace the paradoxical joining of apparent opposites, why should we be surprised that at the macro-level of our lives, we must do the same?

With all of this raised to a new level of consciousness during the run of the play, I was at about the same time reading Parker Palmer’s book, The Courage to Teach. Palmer is one of my heroes in the world of teaching and learning, but imagine my surprise when, on the heels of my immersion in Copenhagen, I found Palmer quoting none other than Niels Bohr.

Palmer argues that our tendency to “look at the world through analytical lenses” causes us to “see everything as this or that, plus or minus, on or off, black or white; and we fragment reality into an endless series of either-ors. In a phrase, we think the world apart” (Palmer, 62). While affirming and respecting the power of analysis on the one hand, he urges us, on the other hand, to reconsider the wholeness and wonder of life, to imagine what it would be like to “think the world together,” to develop “the capacity for connectedness on which good teaching depends” (Palmer, 62).

And here he quotes Niels Bohr: “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.” Here is the concept of paradox—sometimes if we want to know profound truth, “we have to stop thinking the world into pieces and start thinking it together again” (Palmer, 63).

Palmer suggests, and I agree, that our lives constantly confront us with paradoxical profundities that are neither exotic nor esoteric, but rooted in our common human experience. It’s about learning to live creatively in the ceaseless tension of opposites. This idea will almost certainly appear in subsequent posts in this space. I hope you will “stay tuned.”

Sources referenced:

John R. Claypool III, “The Challenge of Maturity.” Unpublished address, Mars Hill College, May 12, 1968
Harry Emerson Fosdick. Living Under Tension. New York: Harper, 1941
Michael Frayne. Copenhagen. New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1998.
Ronald Hepburn. Christianity and Paradox. New York: Pegasus, 1958
Parker J. Palmer. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco:
     Jossey- Bass Publishers, 1998.
Paul Tillich. Systematic Theology, Vol. II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957 (Cf. especially, “The Meaning of
     Paradox in Christian Theology,” pp. 90ff)