White Queen and the Short Oblig

Alice, the White Queen and the Short Oblig

Truth Teller's Paradox Series, Part IX

By John Taylor; 9 January, 2006

I came across the following mention of breakfast while reading at my
breakfast table this morning. I knew then and there that I must start
today's essay with this precious passage from "Alice through the
Looking Glass":

'I can't believe THAT!' said Alice.
'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. 'Try again: draw a long
breath, and shut your eyes.'
Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said: 'one CAN'T believe
impossible things.'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was
your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've
believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

The smug old White Queen is quite right; you can believe impossible
things very easily. If it were not so easy to do fanatics and
fundamentalists, televangelists, dictators and democratic politicians
would all be out of a job, wouldn't they? But Alice is right too,
there is a part of us deep down that insists that it is quite
impossible to be certain of what the mind rejects. But at least the
Queen can see that contradiction is inevitable. She embraces the
paradox and admits it openly and you have to give her credit for that.
She sees what Alice may not, that contradiction is inevitable. This is
absolutely the case. Every statement is false on some level, every
statement may be a lie, intentional or not, or a paradox, intentional
or not. Consider these two sentences:

This sentence is true.
This sentence is false.

The first sentence is an implicit assertion of truth that logicians
tell us can be tacked onto the beginning of everything we say: "It is
the case that..." The second is an instance of the Liar's Paradox. How
can we judge whether either statement is true? Either one may be a
lie. The only way to have any clue is to look at the speaker, to ask,
"Who said that?," "Why did they say it?" Was it someone like Alice who
cares whether it is true or not, or is the speaker like the White
Queen, a barefaced liar? Is the speaker serious or speaking in jest?
Alice may be sincere, truthful, reliable, knowing, and above all
someone who hates contradictions. Or Alice may be just too
literal-minded not to realize how ineluctable paradox and falsity
really are. The White Queen may be the truth teller; the only way to
know is to meet and know the two personally, then judge the truth for
yourself. Only after such examination can we have certainty that a
statement, contradictory or not, in some way makes sense.

In this truth telling series so far we have seen how this Liar's
Paradox, so popular with pre-Socratic philosophers remains undefeated
today in the face of the most sophisticated onslaughts of modern
reasoning. It is discouraging to discover that reason is fatally
flawed, that language resolves into self-contradiction. This discovery
by ancient thinkers remains unassailable today in spite of all that
our vaunted super-computers and armies of academic logicians throw at
it. There is no golden path up Mount Olympus, no way whether we know
it or not to avoid believing at least six impossible things before
breakfast.

Last essay we saw how Socrates answered the Liar's Paradox in the only
adequate way possible, by accommodating it with a brilliance that
still illuminates today. He countered the immovable object with an
unstoppable force, humility. I am calling it the "Truth Teller's
Paradox." In spite of the inevitability of not knowing what you are
talking about, you can still speak the truth. If you are an honest
person, that is. His insight gave birth to philosophy as we know it
and also connected with the wisdom of the Jewish prophets who openly
taught that true piety begins in fearful recognition of how flawed our
reasoning powers are.

"The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge." (Prov 1:7, WEB)

Baha'is are repeatedly reminded of the truth teller's paradox in our
daily noonday prayer which has us stand before God and formally
testify that our purpose is to know and love God. Yet right after we
declare that we are too poor and powerless to do anything on our own.
How can a knower know without power, or a lover love without wealth?
Paradox and self-contradiction, then, are at the center not only of
our knowledge but our reason for being. The noonday prayer is terse
testimony that we ARE a paradox ontologically, epistemologically,
empirically and ethically. As God says, "I am thy Mystery and thou art
Mine." In this prayer we upload, as it were, the paradox to God
Himself. The statement "You created me to perform a contradiction" can
be a great lie or a great truth according to who we are. If we are
sincere, God will want to stand in and make the paradox make sense.
His Power of the Holy Spirit will affirm it as truth. Then it will be
the truth. This is the truth teller's paradox. He downloads our
assertion back to us in the form of our life, our Providence, our
tests for that day. As such this short statement can stand in place of
all further obligatory devotions on a given day.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com