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A
Rational Mystical Ascent: The Coincidence of Opposites in Kabbalistic and Hasidic
Thought
Sanford L. Drob
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© Sanford L. Drob, Ph.D. 2003, 2005
“Just as the Supernal Wisdom is a starting point of
the whole, so is the lower world also a manifestation of Wisdom, and a starting
point of the whole.” (Zohar 1:153a)
“(Looking) upwards from
below, as it appears to eyes of flesh, the tangible world seems to be Yesh and a thing, while spirituality, which is above, is an
aspect of Ayin (nothingness). (But looking) downwards from above the world
is an aspect of Ayin, and everything which is linked
downwards and descends lower and lower is more and more Ayin
and is considered as naught truly as nothing and null” (Schneur Zalman Likutei Torah, Devarim, fol. 83a).
“For the principal point of divine
completeness is that…in every thing is its opposite, and…that all its power
truly comes from the opposing power” (Rabbi Dov Baer,
Ner Mitzvah ve-Torah).
“the revelation of anything
is actually through its opposite…all created things in the world are hidden
within His essence, be He blessed, in one potential, in coincidentia oppositorum...”(Rabbi Aron
Ha-Levi)
“Every actual thing
involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to
comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity
of opposed determinations.” (Hegel’s
Logic, Par. 48, Zusatz 1).
The
doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum,
the interpenetration, interdependence and unification of opposites has long
been one of the defining characteristics of mystical
(as opposed to philosophical) thought. Whereas mystics have often held that
their experience can only be described in terms that violate the “principle of
non-contradiction,” western philosophers have generally maintained that this
fundamental logical principle is inviolable.
Nevertheless, certain philosophers, including Nicholas of Cusa,
Meister Eckhardt and G.W.F. Hegel have held that
presumed polarities in thought do not exclude one another but are actually
necessary conditions for the assertion of their opposites. In the 20th
century the physicist Neils Bohr commented that
superficial truths are those whose opposites are false, but that “deep truths”
are such that their opposites or apparent contradictories are true as well.
The psychologist Carl Jung concluded that the “Self” is a coincidentia oppositorum, and that each individual must strive to
integrate opposing tendencies (anima and animus, persona and shadow) within his
or her own psyche. More recently, postmodern thinkers such as
Derrida have made negative use of the coincidentia
oppositorum idea, as a means of overcoming the privileging of particular
poles of the classic binary oppositions in western thought, and thereby
deconstructing the foundational ideas of western metaphysics.
In this paper I explore the use of coincidentia oppositorum in Jewish mysticism, and its singular
significance for the theology of one prominent Jewish mystical school, Chabad
(or Lubavitch) Chasidism. It is the achievement of Elior
and other modern scholars of Jewish mysticism to have brought the philosophical
use of the coincidentia doctrine by
the Chabad Chasidim to our attention. In this paper I introduce two models
through which we can begin to understand the Kabbalistic and Chasidic
conception of the coincidence of opposites in rational philosophical and
theological terms. These models each
rest upon, and develop, the Kabbalistic/Chasidic view that language (or
representation in general) sunders a primordial divine unity and is thus the
origin of finitude and difference. The first, cartographic model, draws upon the idea that seemingly
contradictory but actually complementary cartographic representations are
necessary in order to provide an accurate two-dimensional representation (or
map) of a spherical world. The second, linguistic model, draws upon Kabbalistic
and postmodern views on the relationship between language and the world, and in
particular the necessity of regarding the linguistic sign as both identical to and distinct from the
thing (signified) it is said to represent.
In the course of my discussion, I hope to provide some insights into the
relevance of coincidentia oppositorum
to contemporary philosophical, psychological, and especially, theological
concerns.
Rational Mysticism
Throughout this paper I engage in what the modern Neoplatonic philosopher, J. N. Findlay, has termed
“rational mysticism.”
Rational mysticism is a method of thought and inquiry that not only articulates
mystical doctrines in rational terms, but utilizes reason to arrive at insights
and conclusions that are typically only arrived at through meditative and other
experiential/mystical techniques. The
“rational mystic,” as I am using this term, endeavors to achieve a unified
conception of the world by rationally
overcoming the distinctions, oppositions and antinomies that have torn it
asunder and given rise to the polarities (e.g. between words and things, mind
and reality, subject and object, humanity and God, good and evil, etc.) that
characterize the world for ordinary, pre-mystical consciousness and discourse.
The key to rational mysticism in the Kabbalah is the
notion of ha-achdut
hashvaah, the “coincidence of opposites,” an idea
that not only “deconstructs” the poles of the various oppositions through which
the world is ordinarily understood, but which also suggests that each term of
an opposition (e.g. God/man, word/thing, freedom/necessity, good/evil, etc.) is
completely (and logically) dependent upon its opposite, i.e. dependent upon the
very ideas and things that the term was meant to oppose or exclude. It is the rational articulation of these
reciprocal dependencies, as opposed to a purely experiential comprehension of
them that distinguishes the rational from the ordinary mystic.
Jewish Mysticism, especially as it is embodied in the Lurianic Kabbalah and its Chabad Hasidic interpretation,
provides a unique framework for overcoming the antinomies of ordinary thought,
and for climbing the ladder of mystical ascent. This ladder leads to a form of
thought in which all oppositions and
antinomies, indeed all things whatsoever (whether they be natural, cultural,
axiological or conceptual) are understood to be critical moments in a
developing, meaningful and divine whole (what the Kabbalists
refer to as Ein-sof, the Infinite,
literally: “Without End”).
Coincidentia Oppositorum in the
Early Kabbalah
The Kabbalists use the term, achdut hashvaah, to denote
that Ein-sof, the Infinite God, is a
“unity of opposites,”
one that reconciles within itself even those aspects of the cosmos that are
opposed to or contradict one another. Sefer Yetzirah, an early (3rd to 6th
century) work which was of singular
significance for the later development of Jewish mysticism, had said of the Sefirot (the ten archetypal values
through which divinity is said to constitute the world) “their end is imbedded
in their beginning and their beginning in their end.”
According to Yetzirah,
the Sefirot are comprised of five
pairs of opposites: “A depth of beginning, a depth of end. A depth of good, a
depth of evil. A depth of above, a depth of below, A depth of east, a depth of
west. A depth of north, a depth of south.
The 13th
century Kabbalist Azriel of
Gerona was perhaps the first Kabbalist to clearly
articulate the doctrine of coincidentia
oppositorum. For Azriel
“Ein Sof …is absolutely undifferentiated in a complete and
changeless unity…He is the essence of all that is concealed and revealed.” According to Azriel,
Ein-sof unifies within itself being
and nothingness, “for the Being is in the Nought
after the manner of the Nought, and the Nought is in the Being after the manner [according to the
modality] of the Being… the Nought is the Being and
Being is the Nought. For Azriel, Ein-sof is also “the principle in which
everything hidden and visible meet, and as such it is the common root of both faith and unbelief.”
Azriel further held that the very essence of the Sefirot, the value archetypes through
with Ein-sof is manifest in a finite
world, involves the union of opposites, and that this unity provides the energy
for the cosmos.
The nature of sefirah
is the synthesis of every thing and its opposite. For if they did not possess
the power of synthesis, there would be no energy in anything. For that which is light is not dark and that
which is darkness is not-light.
Further, the coincidence of opposites is also a
property of the human psyche; “we should liken their (the Sefirot) nature to the will of the soul, for it is the synthesis of
all the desires and thoughts stemming from it.
Even though they may be multifarious, their source is one, either in
thesis or antithesis.”
Azriel was not the only Kabbalist to put forth a principle of coincidentia oppositorum.
The early Kabbalistic Source of
Wisdom describes how God’s name and being is comprised of thirteen pairs of
opposites (derived from the 13 traits of God enumerated in Chronicles), and
speaks of a Primordial Ether (Avir Kadmon), as the medium within which such oppositions
are formed and ultimately united.
Coincidenta Oppositorum in the Lurianic
Kabbalah
The
concept of achdut
hashvaah
figures prominently in the Lurianic Kabbalah, which
became the dominant theosophical and theological force in later Jewish
mysticism. Chayyim Vital (1543-60), the chief
expositor of Isaac Luria (1534-72), records:
Know that before the emanation of the emanated and the
creation of all that was created, the simple Upper Light filled all of
reality…but everything was one simple light, equal in one hashvaah, which is called the
Light of the Infinite.
While Vital’s account
suggests a unity of opposites in the godhead only prior to creation, a close examination of the Lurianic
Kabbalah reveals a series of symbols that are applicable to God, the world and
humanity, and which overcome the polar oppositions of ordinary (and traditional
metaphysical) thought. Indeed, each of the major Lurianic
symbols expresses a coincidence of opposites between ideas that in ordinary
thought and discourse are thought to contradict one another. For example, Luria held that the divine principle of the cosmos is both Ein-sof (without end) and Ayin (absolute
nothingness), that creation is both a hitpashut (emanation) and a Tzimtzum (contraction), that Ein-sof
is both the creator of the world and is itself created and completed through Tikkun ha-Olam,
the spiritual, ethical and “world
restoring” acts of humanity, and, finally, that the Sefirot are both the original elements of the cosmos and only
themselves realized when the cosmos is displaced and shattered (Shevirat ha-Kelim) and
reconstructed by humanity (Tikkun).
A closer
examination of two key elements in the Lurianic
system, Tzimtzum (concealment/contraction)
and Shevirat ha-kelim (the
Breaking of the Vessels) can provides further insights into the Lurianic conception of the coincidence of opposites.
In the
symbol of Tzimtzum (the withdrawal,
concealment and contraction of the infinite that gives rise to the world) there
is a coincidence of opposites between the positive acts of creation and
revelation and the negative acts of concealment, contraction and
withdrawal. For Luria,
God does not create the world through a forging or emanation of a new, finite,
substance, but rather through a contraction or concealment of the one infinite
substance, which prior to such contraction is both “Nothing” and “All.” Like a photographic
slide, which reveals the details of its subject by selectively filtering and
thus concealing aspects of the projector’s pure white light (which is both
“nothing” and “everything”), Ein-sof
reveals the detailed structure of the finite world through a selective
concealment of its own infinite luminescence. By concealing its absolute unity Ein-sof gives rise to a finite and
highly differentiated world. Thus in the symbol of Tzimtzum there is a coincidence of opposites between addition and
subtraction, creation and negation, concealment and revelation. In order to
comprehend the notion of Tzimtzum,
one must simultaneously think two thoughts, for example, one thought pertaining
to divine concealment and a second pertaining to (this concealment as) creation
and revelation.
For Luria, the further realization of Ein-sof is dependent upon a second coincidence of opposites;
between creation and destruction, symbolized in the Shevirat ha-Kelim, the “Breaking of the Vessels.”
Ein-sof is only fully actualized as
itself, when the ten value archetypes which constitute the Sefirot are shattered and
are subsequently restored by humankind (Tikkun
ha-Olam).
While Ein-sof is the source
and “creator” of all,
Ein-sof paradoxically only becomes
itself, through a rupture which results in a broken and alienated world in need
of humanity’s “restoration” and repair (Tikkun).
For Luria, Ein-sof
is propelled along its path from
“nothing” (Ayin)
to “something” (Yesh),
through the creative and restorative acts of humankind; for it is only humanity
acting in a broken and displaced world, that can undertake the mitzvoth, the creative, intellectual,
spiritual and ethical acts that fully actualize the values and traits that
exist in potentia
within God. Indeed, the Sefirot,
which are both the “traits” (middot) of God and the elements of creation, only become
themselves after they are broken and then repaired by humankind. As the
contemporary Kabbalist and sage, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz has put it, “We
live in a world that is the worst of all possible worlds in which there is yet
hope, and that, is the best of all possible worlds.” The reason for this is
that it is only in such a world on the brink, that the divine values (the Sefirot) can be fully actualized.
It is
because humankind actualizes the traits and values that are mere abstract
potentialities in Ein-sof that the Zohar proclaims ”He who ‘keeps’ the
precepts of the Law and ‘walks’ in God’s ways…‘makes’ Him who is above.”
Thus, just as humanity is dependent for its existence upon Ein-sof, Ein-sof is
dependent for its actual being upon humanity. The symbols of Ein-sof, Shevirah (rupture) and Tikkun (Repair) thus express a
coincidence of opposites between the presumably opposing views that God is the
creator and foundation of humanity and humanity is the creator and foundation
of God.
Several
other Lurianic symbols overcome distinctions between
what are generally thought to be opposing terms and ideas. For example, in the symbol of the ten Sefirot, the Kabbalists
articulate a coincidentia between
unity (of the Absolute) and the multiplicity of both God and the world. In the
symbol of Adam Kadmon
(the Primordial Man, which becomes the divine agent of creation) we have
another example of a coincidentia between
God and man., and in the symbol of the Kellipot, the evil husks that envelop the fallen sparks of
divine light after the breaking of the Vessels, there is an explicit coincidentia between good and evil (for
its only the capture of divine light by the forces of evil that creates the
potential for actual good). Finally, in the symbol of Tikkun Ha-Olam (the
Restoration of the World), we again
see a coincidentia oppositorum between theism (God created
man) and atheism (man created God), for by restoring the world through acts of
wisdom, kindness, compassion, etc. humanity not only becomes a partner with God
in creation, but, as we have seen, is said to actually create God himself!
Each of
the Kabbalistic symbols can be understood as a higher order synthesis of an opposition,
antinomy or contradiction that inevitably arises when one thinks deeply about
God, humanity and the world, and each, as I have argued in Symbols of the Kabbalah,
resolves a tension between apparently contradictory philosophical ideas.
Further, the whole Lurianic conception of Ein-sof is that of a dialectically
evolving deity who is understood as logically passing through and embodying a
variety of phases and aspects, each of which opposes, but also embodies, an
earlier phase in the overall scheme. As such, the Kabbalistic deity is both
nothing (Ayin)
and everything (Ein-sof), perfectly
simple and infinitely complex, hidden (Tzimtzum)
and revealed (Sefirot) , reality and
illusion, broken (Shevirat ha-Kelim) and
restored (Tikkun ha-Olam)
creator of humanity and created by humanity, etc. As Ein-Sof
evolves it is revealed to be both the totality of its own evolving dialectic,
as well as each of the points along the way.
For the Kabbalists, this means that Ein-Sof must be constantly redefined, as
by its very nature, it is in a continual process of self-creation which
involves a unification of opposing principles, values, and ideas.
Chabad
Hasidism: The Unification of Opposites as the Purpose of the World
As Stace has pointed out,
mysticisms of many, if not all, cultures develop a paradox in which the
“absolute,” “universal self,” or “truth”
of the world is understood as both vacuum and plenum, as both absolutely
nothing, and the totality of all things.
In addition, several other paradoxes are characteristic of mystical thought;
for example, the validity of both a ‘truth’ and its negation, the reality and
unreality of space and time, and the substantiality and illusory character of
the self. Such paradoxes are present in the mysticisms of Hinduism, Buddhism,
Christianity and Islam as well as in the Kabbalah, where, for example, the
infinite godhead is regarded simultaneously as both nothingness (Ayin) and the infinite (Ein-sof).
However, the mystical paradoxes, which are a pervasive if not dominant theme in
the Kabbalah, achieves their supreme expression in the philosophy of the Chabad
Hasidim, where they become the governing principle for both God and the
world.
For Chabad, all things, both
infinite and finite, involve a unity or coincidence of opposites. These
Chasidim held that the very purpose of creation was the revelation of these
opposites, precisely in order that they should be articulated and then
overcome. One of the early Chabad
thinkers, R. Aaron Ha-Levi Horowitz of Staroselye
(1766-1828), a pupil of the first Chabad- Lubavitcher rabbi, Schneur Zalman
(1745-1813) held that “the revelation of anything is actually through its
opposite,” and
that “all created things in the world are hidden within His essence, be He
blessed, in one potential, in coincidentia
oppositorum...”
Schneur Zalman ‘s son, Rabbi Dov Baer, wrote “within
everything is its opposite and also it is truly revealed as its opposite.” According to Dov
Baer, the unity of worldly opposites brings about the completeness (shelemut) of God
on high: “For the principal point of divine completeness is that…in every thing
is its opposite, and…that all its power truly comes from the opposing power.”
Within the godhead, earthly opposites are united in a single subject. According to R. Aaron Ha-Levi: “He is the
perfection of all, for the essence of perfection is that even those opposites
which are opposed to one another be made one.”
Chabad philosophy which
developed contemporaneously with German idealism, bears a striking resemblance
to the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling
and Hegel. It is interesting to compare Dov Baer’s or
Rabbi Aaron’s pronouncements to Hegel’s claim that:
every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed
elements. Consequently to know, or, in
other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as
a concrete unity of opposed determinations.
The coincidence of opposites
that characterizes God, humanity and the world can be approximately understood
by the simultaneous adoption of two points of view. As put by the founder of
the Chabad movement, Schneur Zalman of Lyadi
(1745-1813):
(Looking) upwards from
below, as it appears to eyes of flesh, the tangible world seems to be Yesh and a thing,
while spirituality, which is above, is an aspect of Ayin (nothingness). (But looking) downwards from above the world
is an aspect of Ayin,
and everything which is linked downwards and descends lower and lower is more
and more Ayin
and is considered as naught, truly as nothing and null.
Indeed, Chabad understands the
world in each of these two ways simultaneously: as both an illusory
manifestation of a concealed divine essence and as the one true actualized
existence. For Chabad, it is
simultaneously true that God is the one reality that creates an illusory world,
and that the world, in particular humankind, is the one reality that gives
actuality to an otherwise empty, if not illusory, God. This dual understanding reflects the
activities of the Tzimtzum, through
which God creates a world by concealing an aspect of Himself, and the Shevirah and Tikkun, in which humankind actualizes
the values that were only potentialities within the Godhead.
While the Chabad Hasidim
generally speak as if the divine perspective upon the world is its “inner truth,”
it becomes clear that on their view this truth is itself completely dependent
upon its opposite, the perspective from which humanity and the material world
are fundamentally existent and real. In
this they were in accord with the early Chasidic leader, the Maggid of Mezrich (1704-1772),
who held that while God is the foundation of all ideas, the very significance
of divine thought is contingent upon its making its appearance in the mind of
man. For the Maggid, God is the source of thought but actual thinking can only occur within
the framework of the human mind.
Chabad takes seriously, and
attempts to spell out the full implications of the Zohar’s
dictim: “Just as the Supernal Wisdom is a starting
point of the whole, so is the lower world also a manifestation of Wisdom, and a
starting point of the whole.”
For Chabad, the highest wisdom, and the fullest conception of the divine is one
in which both perspectives (one beginning with God and the other with humanity)
are included. For Chabad, Ein-sof is
truly a coincidence and unity of opposites, and the fullest understanding and
realization of the divine is one that includes each pole of the Zohar’s “dialectical inversion.” It is only by thinking in both directions
simultaneously that one can grasp the original mystical insight that the
divine is present in all things. One implication of the Chabad view is that a
God who simply creates man (direction one) is far less complete than a God who
is both creator of, and created by,
humankind (directions one and two), and it is only the latter bi-directional
thinking that captures what the Kabbalists designate
as “infinite” (Ein-sof).
According to Elior:
Hasidic thought is strained to the ultimate stage in a
dialectical way; just as there is no separate reality and no discriminative
essence in the world without God, so also God has no revealed and discriminate
existence without the world, that is, just as one cannot speak of the existence
of the world without God, so too one cannot speak of the existence of God
without the world.
For Chabad, all things, both infinite and finite,
involve a unity or coincidence of opposites. According to these Chasidim, the
very purpose of creation is the revelation of these opposites, precisely in
order that they should be articulated and then overcome. However within the godhead, earthly opposites
are united in a single subject. As we
have seen, according to R. Aaron: “He is the perfection of all, for the essence
of perfection is that even those opposites which are opposed to one another be
made one.”
Dialectical
Process in Chabad Thought
For Chabad, “divinity is
conceived as a dialectical process comprising an entity and its opposite
simultaneously,” as Ein-sof embodies the opposites of being”
(yesh) and
“nothingness” (ayin),
emanation (shefa ve-atsilut)
and contraction (Tzimtzum), ascent (ratso) and
descent (vashov),
revelation and concealment, annihilation and embodiment, unity and plurality,
structure and chaos, spirit and matter.
In addition, these Hasidim held that Ein-sof
unifies divine and human perspectives on the world, and that the coincidence of
opposites applies not only to God but to the world and humankind. Finally, each pole of these various
oppositions is thought to be both necessary and determinative for its opposite.
As Elior puts it: “The principle emerging from these
concepts states that divinity possesses two opposing aspects that condition one
another.”
For Schneur Zalman, the truth of
the opposite perspectives is necessary in order for both God and the world to
actualize their unified essence. Schneur Zalman holds that the very meaning of
the cosmos involves a dialectical movement from non-being to being and back to
nothingness. He writes: “the purpose of the creation of the worlds from nothingness
to being was so that there should be a Yesh (Creation), and that the Yesh should be Ayin (Nothing)
For Chabad, in order for Ein-sof to fulfill its essence as the infinite
God, it must differentiate itself and actualize all possibilities in existence (Yesh)
only to have them each return to itself in nothingness (Ayin). According to Rabbi Aaron
Ha Levi it is the basic divine purpose that the world should be differentiated
and revealed in each of its finite particulars and yet united in a single infinite
source. Rabbi Aaron states:
...the essence of His intention is that his coincidentia be manifested in concrete
reality, that is, that all realities and their levels be revealed in actuality,
each detail in itself, and that they nevertheless be unified and joined in
their value, that is, that they be revealed as separated essences, and that
they nevertheless be unified and joined in their value.
We can interpret the process that Schneur Zalman and
Rabbi Aaron describe in the following way. Ein-sof, which is
initially actually nothing but potentially all things, differentiates
and actualizes itself into each of the innumerable manifestations of a finite
world. It does so precisely in order that these finite entities can actualize
the sefirotic values (e.g. wisdom, understanding, kindness, beauty,
compassion, etc.) which are only divine abstractions prior to the world’s
creation. By instantiating these intellectual, spiritual, ethical and aesthetic
values, the entities of the finite world (i.e. human beings) negate their
individual desire and will, and “return” to Ein-sof
(Ayin or
“nothing”). From another perspective, humanity actually constitutes the source of all value, Ein-sof, and in this
way achieves unity with the divine. For
this reason, a world that is alienated from and then reunited with God is
superior to one that had never been alienated or divided at all.
There is thus a practical,
spiritual and ethical dimension to the “coincidence of opposites” that finds
its expression in the Chabad system of belief. Schneur Zalman implores his
followers both to nullify (bittul) the self and matter in favor of the Godhead and to bring about the infusion of the
divine will into the material world through religious worship and the
performance of divine mitzvoth (commandments). According to Schneur
Zalman:
there are two aspects in the service of the Lord. One seeks to leave its sheath of bodily
material. The second is the… aspect of
the drawing down of the divinity from above precisely in the various vessels in
Torah and the commandments.
Further, “Just as one annihilates oneself from Yesh (Existence) to Ayin (Nothingness), so too it is
drawn down from above from Ayin to Yesh, so that the light of the infinite may emanate
truly below as it does above.”
Again, there is a coincidence of opposites on the level of spiritual and moral
action. One must annihilate one’s finite separate existence in favor of the
infinite God, and in the process one is paradoxically able to draw down the
divine essence into the vessels of the finite world. For Chabad, there is thus
an “upper unification” (Yichud ha-elyon) in
which the world and self are annihilated in favor of their re-inclusion within
the godhead, and a “lower unification” (Yichud ha-tachton) in which there is an influx of divinity into
the world. What’s more, each of these
“unifications” is fully dependent upon the other. It is thus through a doctrine of the
coincidence of opposites that Chabad is able to combine the opposing principles
of mystical quietism and an active concern with the material world.
Incidentally, I believe that
through their doctrine of achdut hashvaah, the
coincidence of the dual aspects of infinite and finite existence, the Chabad
Hasidim are able to avoid the pantheistic implications that might otherwise
attach to the view that there is nothing outside of God. Although Schneur
Zalman and others in the Chabad tradition make such acosmic
declarations as: “Everything is as absolutely nothing and nought in relation to His (God’s) being and essence,”“For
in truth there is no place devoid of Him…and there is nothing truly beside Him,
and ”although the worlds seem like an entity to us, that is an utter lie,”
such pronouncements are only from one of two equally valid points of view, the supernal
one. In Chabad the traditional Jewish
distinction between God and creation, is not discarded but is dynamically
transformed into two “starting points” or “points of view,” which though
dialectically interdependent, must at the same time remain distinct in order to
fulfill the purpose of both God and the universe. Chabad is actually typically Jewish in its
view that God’s presence and glory fills the whole earth, but that humanity
must be distinguished from God and granted a measure of freedom, in order that
it may return to Him through worship and mitzvoth. Metaphysically speaking, Chabad again bids us
to think two opposite thoughts simultaneously; the thoughts (1) that God is all
and there is nothing beside Him, and (2) that God and humanity are separate and
distinct and humanity is implored to return to, and in effect constitute
God, through divine worship and the performance of the mitzvoth.
It
is, I believe, the double movement of Chabad thought, its insistence on a
coincidence between two opposing perspectives on the reality of God and
humanity that differentiates it from most other forms of mysticism, and
underscores its significance for philosophy and theology. While according to Elior,
“The great intellectual effort invested in Chabad writings is meant to bring
one as close as possible to the divine point of view, according to which every
creature is considered as nothing and nought with
respect to the active power within it, ”
a close reading of Chabad formulations as they are found even Elior’s
own writings suggests a much more subtle theology. The goal of Chabad thought, it seems to me,
is to bring us as close as possible to simultaneously realizing both the worldly and divine
points of view, thinking them simultaneously, and recognizing their complete
interdependence; thereby providing us with an intimation of the fullness of
divinity as it is manifest in the world and humankind.
As we proceed we will come
to understand that the paradoxes of Jewish mysticism, e.g. that God creates humanity
and humanity creates the divine, that the world is both an illusion and
reality, that Ein-sof is and is not identical with the world,
that creation is at the same time a negation, that values must be destroyed in
order to be actualized, etc. are the best means of expressing within language,
truths about a whole that is sundered by the very operation of language itself.
While each of these paradoxes will not necessarily require the same type of
analysis, in general we will see that within the necessary but false (or
partial) consciousness of language and concepts, mystical truths can only be
expressed as a series of contradictions, which, because of the complete
interdependence of their opposing terms, dissipate once things are viewed from
a “rational mystical” point of view.
It will be my task in the
following pages to come as close to articulating the mystical point of view as
is possible, given the fact that language itself is predicated upon distinctions
(e.g. between subject and object, and, more fundamentally, between words and their objects) that prevent the mystical
point of view from being completely expressed. But I am here getting ahead of
myself; much groundwork in modern and, especially, postmodern, philosophy, must
be laid before we can fully enter this field.
The Coincidence of Opposites in Other Traditions
The
“coincidence of opposites” is neither original to, nor the exclusive province
of Jewish Mysticism, and it will be useful to consider this doctrine as it
appears in the non-Jewish mystical and philosophical sources.
In Eastern
Thought
Paradox
and contradiction are more readily accepted
in Eastern philosophical traditions than in west. As Graham Priest has
pointed out the logicians of ancient India standardly
held that propositions could be (1) true only, (2) false only, (3) both true
and false, or (4) both true and false (to which the Buddhist added “none of
these”). The Jains went so far as to hold that a proposition could be
both true only and both true and false. Contradictory propositions abound in Taoism,
and it is clear that in the Japanese school of Buddhism, Chan or Zen, which
fused the teachings of the Buddha and the Tao, contradictions (in the forms of Koans) play a significant role in propelling the adherent
towards enlightenment.
Amongst
Buddhist thinkers, Nagarjuna (c. 150-220 CE), who
founded the Madhyamaka (Middle Path) school of
Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, is well-known for advocating such apparently
contradictory ideas as “space is not an entity [and] it is not a non-entity”
and “the assertion that effect and cause
are similar is not acceptable (and) the assertion that they are not similar is
also not acceptable.” Nagarjuna held that nirvana is
equivalent to samsara (i.e. the “depths” of things
are equivalent to their “surface”) and (in Mark Siderits’
paraphrase) “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth”.
While it is arguable that at least some of these contradictions are only
apparent (i.e. they can be “corrected” by placing them in their polemical
contexts or showing that a single term is used in more than one sense), there
is little doubt that Nagarjuna (and Buddhism) in
general holds that certain “deep truths” can only be expressed using
paradoxical language and that Nagarjuna held their to
be a coincidence (or identity) between at least some opposing terms and ideas.
Gnosticism
The
coincidence of opposites is an important doctrine in the Gnostic religion,
which flourished in both Christian and Jewish circles during late Hellenistic
times. The Gnostics, for example, held that to know one’s arche (beginning) is to know
one’s telos
or end,
that one can become the knowledge that is known (via a reunion with one’s
divine self), that both God and reality are androgynous (both “Mother” and “Father”). The Gnostics
further held there to be a radical coincidentia oppositorum between God and
man, affirming, for example:
God created men, and men created God. So is it also
in the world, since men created gods and worship them as their creations it
would be fitting that gods should worship men.
The Gnostics typically held that the coincidence of opposites occurs between a perfect divine and a
corrupt worldly reality, and, in contrast to the Kabbalists
who saw it as an expression of divine perfection, the Gnostics held that coincidentia oppositorum provides
insight into the corruption of the perfect One. Nevertheless, in the Gnostic (Nag
Hammadi) text, Thunder,
The Perfect Mind, we find an expression of the nature of Sophia (Wisdom)
and the human soul in purely dialectical terms:
“I am the first and the last…the honored and the scorned…the whore and the holy
one...the bride and the bridegroom… the mother of my father…the sister of my
husband and he is my offspring...knowledge and ignorance…the one whom they call
Life, and you have called Death…a mute who does not speak, and great is my
multitude of words.
Plotinus
The Neoplatonists elaborated a philosophical perspective that
provided the basis for much subsequent mystical speculation, both Christian and
Jewish. The idea that God and the world exist in coincidentia oppositorum
finds a prominent place in Plotinus’ Enneads,
where we learn that the “All” is necessarily “made up of contraries,”
that “to deny Evil…is necessarily to do away with the Good as well.” Plotinus further
held that “in the Intellectual-Principle Itself there is a complete identity of
knower and known.”
For Plotinus, “the Supreme must be an entity in which
the two (knower and known) are one.” Indeed, according to Scholem,
the notion of God as a coincidentia
oppositorum may have entered the Kabbalah via the Christian Neoplatonist, Scotus Erigena, who possibly served as a model for such Kabbalists as Azriel of Gerona.
Nicholas of Cusa
The idea
of God as a coincidence of opposites is expressed in the philosophy of the
Christian theologian, Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464), and
Cusanus, as he is called, will serve to provide us
with a carefully developed example of the a non-Jewish, pre-Kantian
understanding of opposition and paradox in western thought.
Cusanus argued that rational investigation can only
approximate knowledge of the infinite God, which can never be understood in
terms of the “relations and comparisons” of the philosopher. However, according
to Cusanus, there is a similar, if less radical,
limitation of knowledge with regard to all other things; for while “truth” is
an absolute, knowledge is always an approximation by degree. Cusanus uses the image of a polygon with an increasing
number of sides that is inscribed in a circle to illustrate how knowledge only
approximates its object. Cusanus held that each
perspective we take upon truth is only partial and relative. However, not even the sum of all perspectives
yields truth in an absolute sense.
More to
the point of our current concerns, Nicholas of Cusa
argued that the principle of non-contradiction invoked by philosophers
was simply evidence of the weakness in the human intellect. He criticized the idea that contradictory
assertions cannot both simultaneously be true with regard to a given object;
for Cusanus contradictory assertions can both be true
regarding both the world and, in particular, God. Cusanus
held that there is a faculty superior to reason, what he termed the faculty of
“knowing” or “intellect,” which can transcend the principle of
non-contradiction to comprehend the unity or interdependence of opposites
operating in the world and in God.
According
to Cusanus, it is in God that all oppositions are
reconciled. For example, it is possible
to say of the deity that He is both the absolute maximum and the
absolute minimum. Cusanus uses mathematical examples
to demonstrate how opposites can coincide; for example, he asks his readers to
imagine a circle of infinite circumference whose curvature becomes equal to
that of an infinitely straight line, yielding a coincidence of opposites
between line and circle, straight and curved.
For
Nicholas of Cusa, God both transcends the
world and is imminent within it; like a face reflected in a mirror. Echoing a Neoplatonic theme, Cusanus held that each creature, indeed all things, are
mirrored and hence, paradoxically present, in every other, creating a coincidentia
between unity and difference.
Interestingly,
Cusanus seems to have anticipated the Kabbalistic
doctrine of Tzimtzum, in his view that all specific forms and all
individual things are contractions of the most universal form, the Soul of the
World. According to Cusanus,
the universe itself is a contraction of the infinite God. In light of his
affinities to the Kabbalah, it is also worth noting that in his work, On the Peace of Faith, Cusanus made use of the principle of coincidentia oppositorum
in an effort to reconcile differences amongst the world’s religions; such
reconciliation, he believed, would lead to a universal faith and peace.
Like
nearly all mystics and philosophers who have considered the question (as we
will see, Hegel is the notable exception) Nicholas of Cusa
held that the principle of coincidentia oppositorum ultimately
transcends rational comprehension. In God, both essence and existence, maximum
and minimum, and all other opposites fully coincide, but we cannot attain a
rational understanding of the synthesis of these oppositions
The Coincidence of Opposites in Modern Philosophy,
Psychology and Science
We will now turn our attention to the tradition in
European philosophy, beginning with Kant, which concerned itself with the
variety of oppositions, antinomies or apparent contradictions that the mind
runs up against whenever it deeply ponders the ultimate nature of the
world. While it will not here be
possible to survey this tradition in great detail, it would be hardly be
possible to offer a rational interpretation of the coincidence of opposites
without at least considering it. In the
following pages I provide a brief survey of this broad tradition, focusing on
several of its representatives, Kant, Schelling,
Hegel and Jacques Derrida, each of whom, in their own way were concerned with
overcoming the polar oppositions of traditional metaphysical thought. In
addition, I will provide a description of the views two recent philosophers,
Morris Lazerowitz and Graham Priest, who reflected
upon the role of contradiction in philosophy and logic respectively. Finally, I
will briefly discuss the views of the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, and the
Danish physicist, Neils Bohr, who in the twentieth
century imported the notion of the coincidence of opposites into scientific
discourse.
Kant’s Dual-World Solution
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) regarded certain
contradictions or antinomies generated by common reason to be both the major
problems of philosophy and the major impetus to his “transcendental
philosophy.” Kant argued, for example,
that since human reason inevitably regards itself to be both determined
by nature and infinitely free, any philosophy that failed to do justice to
each of these, apparently contradictory claims would at best be hopelessly
incomplete. Kant held that the postulate of universal causality (determinism)
was absolutely necessary for science, while the postulate of human freedom was
equally necessary in the realms of morality and the law. Kant’s solution to
this paradox was to, in effect, assert that both poles of the antinomy are
true, but he endeavored to avoid running afoul of the logical principle of
non-contradiction, by postulating that each is true of separate realm.
Kant thus felt compelled to postulate his now famous distinction between the phenomenal
and noumenal realms, the former considered by
him to be the arena of knowledge and empirical investigation, while the latter
was considered an inherently unknowable but necessary postulate for practical
action, moral and legal judgments.
Kant’s solution to the antinomies inherent in
philosophy and common sense was to posit two-worlds, each of which was, in
effect, completely independent of the other, and only one of which could be the
proper object of scientific and philosophical knowledge. In his later work, Kant suggested that the
unknowable noumenal realm, was indeed the realm of
religious faith and God, and he thus came close to adopting the mystical point
of view that there is a realm, unknowable to science and reason, which is
nonetheless accessible to a certain ethical or religious intuition.
Kant, in his Critique
of Pure Reason had held that the impenetrable barrier to knowledge of the noumenal realm was a function of the structures and
categories of the human mind. These
categories, or what Kant referred to as “modes of apprehension” (amongst which
are space, time, and causality) make knowledge of phenomenal “appearances” possible, but render impossible
all knowledge regarding things as they are “in-themselves.” Knowledge of the thing-in-itself
or the noumenal realm is impossible precisely because
all knowledge is necessarily conditioned by the a priori categories and modes of apprehension of the human mind.
For Kant, it is because “ultimate reality” is completely unknowable apart from
its appearance through human modes of apprehension, that traditional
metaphysics and theology is impossible.
Despite
Kant’s disclaimers, by the time of his later works, the Critique of
Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment, Kant appeared to have
much to say regarding the so-called noumenal
world. Kant noted that while the
phenomenal world necessarily follows the laws of causal, mechanical necessity,
the moral law requires man to transcend the causal nexus, act on the basis of
will, and conform his behavior to the rule of reason. He therefore concluded that the demands of
ethics and the individual’s capacity to act in accordance with the moral law
were windows into a non phenomenal, noumenal reality. For Kant, God, freedom, and reason were each
necessary hypotheses for morality, though each were, on his view, outside the
phenomenal order, and therefore part of the noumenal
realm. While Kant continued to hold that there was no metaphysical knowledge regarding these noumenal hypotheses, by placing them in a world or “realm”
he reopened the door to metaphysics, one which such German Idealists as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were
to enter shortly after Kant’s death.
Kant’s
hypothesis of a noumenal realm, is in many ways
characteristic of the religious and particularly mystical consciousness in
general. Finding no place in the natural order for the objects of his
experiences and/or speculations, and, further, recognizing that these objects
often contradict the data of the human senses, the mystically inclined
philosopher or theologian is apt to speak of a higher consciousness or “world”
as the realm of his experience and understanding. From the point of view of the
present study it is important to note that the very notions that Kant
attributed to the “unknowable” noumenal realm, i.e.
God, will, reason, and ethical values are the same notions, which the
Kabbalist’s closely identified with the unknowable Ein-sof.
Schelling
A
post-Kantian reformulation of the position earlier adopted by Nicholas of Cusa can be found in Friedrich Schelling
(1775-1854), who held that the “Absolute” is the “vanishing point” of all
distinctions and difference. For Schelling, the
Absolute is indeed the act in which the distinctions between subject and object
are overcome. The viewpoints of subject and object are necessary standpoints of
all empirical (i.e. human) consciousness. Only God can stand outside of this
distinction. If we attempt to grasp the
Absolute as it is in itself we can only conceptualize it as the “point of
indifference” or the vanishing point of all distinctions. Rational inquiry,
however, cannot apprehend the coincidence of opposites and the vanishing of
difference; however, Schelling assures us that all
distinctions of thought, including all philosophical controversies, i.e. that
between realism and idealism, have no meaning from the standpoint of the
Absolute. We will have occasion to return to the question of standing outside
the subject/object distinction and other polarities of thought, after we have
had an opportunity to survey the desconstruction of
these polarities in postmodern philosophy.
Hegel’s
Dialectical Idealism
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), recognized
the prevalence of antinomies in conceptual thought, but rejected Kant’s
distinction between phenomena and noumena, arguing that Kant’s positing of a “thing-in-itself”
as the source of freedom, morality and faith involved an illegitimate extension
of the phenomenal category of causality into a realm where on Kant’s own theory
it could have no legitimate application. Further, Hegel held that any assertion that
the noumenal realm exists and provides the foundation
for ethics, makes it knowable, and thereby undermines Kant’s claim that
“knowledge” is restricted to phenomena. Hegel concluded that anything whatsoever that
can be referred to must, at least in principle, be knowable, and that since all
that can be known is either a presentation to or category of the mind, all
knowledge, and, hence, all existence, is essentially “idea”. As a result of this equation of
knowledge, existence and idea, the distinction between the mind and its objects
collapses and Kant’s reason for speaking about the phenomenal and noumenal realms (and hence about an essential unknown) completely dissolves.
Hegel took a much different, more dynamic approach to
the antinomies or contradictions that appear in conceptual and philosophical
thought, and he proceeded to enlist the Kantian, and other antinomies as the
fuel for his famous “dialectic,” arguing that the mind’s taking up a position
on one pole of an opposition inevitably leads to a breakdown in that pole, the
necessity of entertaining its opposite, and the appearance of a more embracing
idea that both deepens the original notion and then serves as the ground for
the next stage in the dialectical process.
Hegel thus attempted to make rational, philosophical sense of the notion
that a concept’s opposite or contradictory is implicit in itself, and his
philosophy is, in effect, the first systematic attempt to provide a rational
basis for the mystical notion of coincidentia oppositorum.
I think it is fair to say that regardless of whether
one holds Hegel in high or low esteem, any contemporary discussion of the
interplay of opposites in our conception of God, humanity, and the world, must
begin with Hegel. Whatever else he is
(and there are probably more interpretations of Hegel than of any other
philosopher) Hegel has to be regarded as the major philosophical representative
of the view that contrary if not contradictory notions are implicit within one
another and are indeed interdependent ideas. While it is unclear whether Hegel
actually discovered a new form of thinking or logic, it is clear that he
articulated a point of view in which (at least apparent)
contradiction was essential, as opposed to being fatal, to our thinking. Priest
quotes Hegel’s reformulation of one of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion: “Something
moves, not because at one moment it is here and another there, but because at
one and the same moment it is here and not here, because in this “here”, it at
once is and is not.”
Hegel makes us
aware that thought itself is dependent upon conceptual dichotomies that permit
us to express distinctions between the world’s things and amongst our own
ideas. Yet he goes beyond this simple
assertion to the view that there is a class of philosophical oppositions, e.g.
thought and nature, universal and particular, master and slave that not only
require one another, but which, when pressed to their extremes and pondered
thoroughly, actually pass into their opposites.
Hegel himself had some acquaintance with Kabbalistic
symbols and ideas.
In his Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, Hegel says that “Kabbalah is called the secret wisdom of the
Jews,” and he makes reference to Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar,
as well as Rabbi Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Puerto
del Cielo (The Gate of Heaven). He indicates that while there is much
enigma and fantasy in these works, “there are certainly some genuinely
interesting determinations of a fundamental nature [Grundbestimmungen]
in these books.” Hegel makes passing reference to Ein Sof, the Tzimtzum, Adam Kadmon, Keter, the ten Sefirot,
and briefly describes the Kabbalistic doctrine of the “four worlds.” However, apart from these brief references
there is no sustained discussion of the Kabbalah in any of Hegel’s writings or
lectures. Still, Hegel may have been influenced by Kabbalistic ideas
indirectly, through his reading of Jacob Boehme
(1575-1624), the German mystic and theosophist. Boehme,
who had a profound impact on both Schelling and Hegel
was himself likely influenced by Zoharic and other Kabbalistic ideas (Hegel attributes the
Kabbalistic symbol of Adam Kadmon to Boehme!).
Hegel may have also encountered Kabbalistic notions through his association
with Schelling and their mutual reading of the Swabian Pietists (e.g. Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, 1702-1782).
Hegel adopts and provides a philosophical basis for
the mystical (and Kabbalistic) view that all concepts and things have their
contraries, as it were, hidden away within themselves, and
he holds that there is an important sense in which apparent opposites are
actually identical. For example, Hegel
argues that the notion of being,
which is generally thought to opposed to and distinct from knowledge, actually contains knowledge as part of its essence. This is because what we mean by saying that
something has “being” is that it must at least be potentially known. For Hegel “being” is precisely what
consciousness makes of it, and “knowing” is conversely nothing but the contents
(being) of such consciousness. As such,
these two apparently contrary ideas exist in a state of coincidentia oppositorum, and are in an important sense
identical. Another way of summarizing
this position is to say that Hegel seeks to overcome the knowledge/being or
subject/object distinction.
Hegel
makes use of the term “dialectical” to refer to (what he believes to be) the
logical and historical processes through which concepts or things pass into
their opposites and the distinctions between opposing terms are broken down. For Hegel, dialectics is the essence of
creativity. However, while concepts that
are subject to the dialectic are transformed, they are never lost completely;
they are “lifted up” in such a manner as to provide insight into their original
essence. As the above example of being
and knowledge illustrates, this insight reveals apparently opposing or
contradictory terms to be mutually dependent ideas. Hegelian thought thus
provides one valuable point of view from which to develop a contemporary
reading of the Kabbalistic doctrine of coincidentia
oppositorum.
Paradox
and Contradiction as the Hallmark of Philosophy
Nearly 40 years ago Morris Lazerowitz
developed the view that “a paradox or contradiction lies hidden in every
metaphysical theory” and that antinomy is in fact the hallmark of philosophy. Lazerowitz argued that all, or nearly all, metaphysical
arguments result in contradictions, but acknowledged that “unlike mathematical
contradictions, metaphysical contradictions are the kind of contradictions
about which it is possible permanently to disagree as to whether they are
contradictions.” An
example, Lazerowitz adduces, is that of an uncaused
occurrence (or uncaused cause), which philosophers from Empodocles
to Bradley regarded as a self-contradiction, but which other philosophers,
notably A.J. Ayer, found perfectly conceivable. Lazerowitz
writes that “this intellectual deadlock, and a great number of others
encountered in philosophy, make inescapable the thought that perhaps every
philosophical statement is one side of an antinomy. Lazerowitz points out that philosophers have differed
regarding the significance of antinomies in philosophy. For instance, Kant, who
developed several such antinomies held that there existence “points to a transcendent
world into which the human mind is not privileged to enter” while Bradley held
that the antinomies of experience implied the unreality of sensible phenomena.
Lazerowitz further argues that “. …in the case of a vast number
of…views in philosophy, the paradoxical fact emerges that the arguments adduced
for a proposition imply the invalidity of a distinction which the proposition
requires.” He concludes that “this paradox is a sphinx whose riddle must have
an answer, and undoubtedly an answer will someday be forthcoming.” Lazerowitz himself
developed the Wittgensteinian view that “philosophy
has the substance of a verbally contrived intellectual mirage and that it is a
subject which only in outward appearance seeks to discover the truths about
things.” He went
on to suggest the Freudian view that psychological wishes propel the
philosopher to contrive metaphysical positions that are cast in the language of
“logical argument” and “truth” but which in fact serve very subjective needs.
Of course,
if Lazerowitz is right, then his view that “every
philosophical argument is one side of an antinomy” is itself one pole of an
antinomy, and thus essentially contestable. Further, we need by no means grant
that Lazerowitz (or Wittgenstein) has finally solved the
“riddle” of philosophy’s tendency to undermine its own propositions. Indeed, we
will have occasion to proffer an answer to Lazerowitz’s
riddle, though in its more “positive” formulation, when we explore the tendency
for arguments adduced for a given philosophical proposition to imply the
validity of the very position or distinction which the argued-for proposition
is meant to exclude.
Dialetheism
Recently,
the notion that contradictory statements may both be true has been revived by
the logician Graham Priest and others who have argued that it is only western
philosophical prejudice that has held the “law of non-contradiction” (if A then
not not A)
to be both inviolate and a condition for rationality. According to Graham,
philosophy has long rested on the defense of this “law” in Four of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a defense which is at worst trivial and confused and
at best non-persuasive. According to Graham, a major argument in
favor of dialetheism
(the possibility for true contradictions) stems from such logical anomalies as
the liar’s paradox (“This sentence is
not true”) which yield logically sound arguments that result in a
contradiction. Graham tells us that in spite of numerous attacks against such
paradoxes, the result of these attacks is to simply relocate the paradoxes
elsewhere in a chain of reasoning. Graham believes that there are a number of
other phenomena that can only be adequately handled by a violation of the law
of non-contradiction and the adoption of a dialetheistic
logic. These include transition states, as when a person is exiting a room (is
he in or out of the room?), paradoxes of motion (as described in reference to
Zeno and Hegel above), terms (such a “death”) that have multiple criteria of
application, and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics (in which, for example, a
single sub-atomic particle is said to move through two slits at once).
To this we might add the paradoxes of time, for example, that the present is
both completely distinct from yet imbued with the past and the future. In
addition, and perhaps most significantly, claims about the ultimate nature of
things, such as Kant’s claim that is impossible to assert anything whatsoever
about ultimate “noumenal” reality, or the Kabbalist’s
claim that it is impossible to say anything at all about Ein-sof, violate the law of non-contradiction, because in the very
act of making such claims one does precisely what one says cannot be done.
The
notion of dialetheistic logic is not without its
critics. For example, it has been pointed out that dialetheism
has difficulty handling negation and disagreement; for if I show an opponent in
a debate that his views are false or wrong he can dialetheistically
agree but still assert that his views are also true and correct! Priest has
argued that the dialetheist must distinguish between
those (presumably few) contradictions that are rationally acceptable and those
that are not, but there are difficulties in characterizing the latter within a
formal logical system. Efforts to delimit the class of sentences that are dialetheistic have not been wholly successful, and appear
to be an ad hoc in nature.
Other critics have held that acceptance of the law of non-contradiction is a
pre-requisite for both meaning and rationality. It is thought, for example,
that a sentence is meaningful only if it rules something out. Graham counters
that the sentence “Everything is true” is meaningful without excluding
anything. With respect to rationality, Priest points out that consistency is only one criteria that
has a bearing on truth; evidence
being another, and there is evidence (even if it is arguably inconclusive) for
the truth of certain contradictions such
as the liar’s paradox.
Priest
raises the interesting and time-honored question of whether (both western and
eastern) philosophers’ contradictory assertions might be restated in
non-contradictory form. While it is his view, for example, that some of Nagarjuna’s (and other philosophers’) apparent paradoxes
can be re-stated this way, he holds that certain fundamental utterances in
philosophy (e.g. that it is impossible to speak about ultimate things, or that
the nature of ultimates is that they have no ultimate
nature) can only be expressed using dialetheistic
language.
We will have occasion to
explore the question of the ultimate nature and status of the “coincidence of
opposites” later in this paper. Here I would like to briefly note that while
the doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum
may best be formalized via dialetheistic logic (as
the truth of both A and not A) not all
true contradictions involve a
coincidence of opposites in the sense suggested by the Jewish mystics. Indeed,
there are true contradictions of the form neither
A nor not A (such as Nagarjuna’s view that
space is neither an entity nor a non-entity, or the Buddha’s purported view
that the Saint neither survives nor does not survive his physical death) that
do not comport well with the Kabbalistic formula “the union of all
contradictions”. (As an aside, the quantum physics view that photons are both particles and not particles comports better with the coincidentia idea, because of its positive formulation.) We might say that with regard to those who
accept the possibility of true contradictions, there are those who adopt the
point of view of “neither” (e.g. “it is neither
true that the world exists nor that it exist”) and those who adopt the point of
view of “both” (“it is both true that
the world exists and does not exist”). Buddhism, we might say, is a tradition
of “the neither”, whereas Judaism, especially Jewish mysticism has largely been
a tradition of “the both”. It is, I believe, only within the traditions of “the
both” that the doctrine of coincidentia
oppositorum is easily formulated. One can readily state, for example, that
the world’s existence is dependent on its non-existence and vice versa
(understanding this paradox is another matter), but it is much more difficult
to state that the falsity of the world’s existence is dependent upon the
falsity of its non-existence, etc. With the Buddhist (or Wittgensteinian)
view of “the neither” it would seem that one’s entire framework must be
overturned and one’s concepts discarded rather synthesized. Of course, a dialethician may well be open to the possibility of
accepting both “both” and “neither,” holding that the collapse of one’s
conceptual framework implied by “the neither” is necessary to arrive at “the
both” and vice versa.
Carl Jung and Coincidentia Oppositorum
Early in
the twentieth century, the interest in opposition and antinomy spread from
philosophy to psychology. Noting the
tendency of the human mind to think in either/or terms, psychologists developed
theories and therapies that implored individuals to embrace those aspects of
their psyches, which they had hitherto tended to ignore, reject or otherwise
exclude. Psychoanalysis, for example, sought to expand the psychic field to
include both conscious and unconscious, and socially acceptable as well as unacceptable
ideas, emotions and impulses. Carl Jung
went so far as to hold that the fully developed or individuated self is a coincidentia
oppositorum, a coincidence or blending of oppositions. Drawing upon
spiritual and practical traditions that had themselves been marginalized in the
history of western thought (Gnosticism, alchemy and the Kabbalah), and
embracing eastern (Taoist and Hindu) modes of thought as well as western
(Christian) mysticism. Jung’s vision of humanity was one that united the
polarized aspects of both the individual and the “collective” psyche.
It would not be an
exaggeration to say that for Jung the “coincidence of opposites” is the key
principle of his entire psychology.
Elaborating on the basic Freudian insights that there are no contradictions
in the unconscious and that personality develops as a result of psychological
conflict, Jung articulated a conception
of the whole "Self" which unifies the conscious and the
unconscious, the personal and the impersonal and a whole host of other
archetypal oppositions (e.g. between anima [female] and animus [male], shadow
and persona, etc.). As Jung himself put it "The self is made
manifest in the opposites and the conflicts between them; it is a coincidentia oppositorum”. For Jung, the measure of both an individual
and an entire culture is the capacity to recognize polarity and paradox and to
balance and unify oppositions. However, in contrast to Hegel, Jung held that
the “union of opposites on a higher level of consciousness is not a rational
thing, nor is it a matter of will; it is a process of psychic development that
expresses itself in symbols.”
Indeed, Jung himself held that Hegel had erred by intellectualizing what were
essentially insights into human psychology. One might, perhaps more dispassionately, say
that Jung attempts in the realm of the symbolic, mythological and the psychic
what Hegel endeavored to accomplish in the sphere of reason: a dialectic of
oppositions and antinomies leading to the full development of psyche or "mind".
From a
Jungian perspective, the Kabbalah performs on the level of myth and symbol, an
integration of oppositions that would lead to contradiction and absurdity when
considered on the level of reason and ideas. The Kabbalistic views that God creates
man but man completes and, in effect creates God, that God himself is both the
absolute being and total nothingness, that in order to realize the good, man
must first pass through the realm of evil, that creation is negation (and vice
versa), that destruction of values is the condition of their realization, that
man himself is incomplete unless he is both male and female, and that the dialectical tensions of the
cosmos are mirrored in the psychology of man, are not, on the Jungian view,
philosophical theses that can be rationally proved or disproved, but rather
symbols, myths and metaphors that assist the psyche in integrating the
conflicts and contradictions that it experiences daily. The coincidence of
opposites is not, as Hegel supposed, a reational
truth, but a symbolic and psychological one, to be lived rather than merely
thought. According to Jung, the mind becomes preoccupied with antinomies
precisely because one pole of a psychic or emotional contrary has seized
control of the individual and must be balanced by the other pole. According to
Jung, the repressed unconscious poles "stand in compensatory relation to
the conscious mind"
and, in effect, form a "shadow" which expresses itself in dreams,
symptoms etc., all in an effort to balance the individual’s
"persona."
One can
hardly argue against Jung’s assertion that the coincidence of opposites must be
lived as well as thought, and, indeed, the Kabbalists
and particularly the Hasidim, recognized that the ideas and symbols that they
originally attributed to the higher worlds must be, and indeed are, mirrored in
the psyche and emotions of the individual. For example, the 13th
century Kabbalist, Azriel
of Gerona held that the energy of the human soul derives from the heavenly Sefirot, and that each Sefirah
was a psychological power or physical organ in man. Abraham Abulafia
(1240-after 1291) understood the names of the ten Sefirot (thought, wisdom, understanding, mercy, fear, beauty,
victory, splendor, etc.) as referring to processes taking place in the mind and
body of man, and thought it possible for man to cleave to these attributes
through proper meditation.
Amongst the Hasidim, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichov
(1740-1809) held that “Man is a counterpart of the Attributes on high”, and
provided a one to one correspondence between these attributes and parts of the
human body. Rabbi Dov Baer, the
Maggid of Mezrich
(1704-1772), who succeeded the Baal Shem Tov as the
leader of the early Hasidic movement, taught “that everything written in (Vital’s) Sefer Etz Chayyim (the major exposition of the Lurianic Kabbalah) also exists in the world and in man”. As we have seen, the “Maggid”
(who Jung later said anticipated his whole psychology)
went so far as to hold that the significance of divine thought is dependent
upon this thought making its appearance in the mind of man, a view suggesting a
coincidence of opposites between the minds of God and man, and which enables us
to see why Jung considered the Maggid to be his own
predecessor.
Jung
himself recognized the importance of the Kabbalah for a psychological
understanding of coincidentia oppositorum.
He was particularly interested in the Kabbalists’
divine wedding symbolism,
which he understood as symbolic of the union between opposites in general, the
union between God and man, and the unity within the Godhead. Jung refers to the
division between the masculine Sefirah,
Tiferet and
feminine Sefirah, Malchut when he states “Our current
state of disequilibrium results from a rupture between the King and the Queen,
who must be reunited to restore God his original unity.
In 1955, after a massive heart attack that nearly killed him, Jung had
Kabbalistic visions which he later came to regard as “the most tremendous
things [he had] ever experienced”.
In these visions Jung experienced himself as Rabbi “Simon ben
Jochai” (who according to Kabbalistic tradition, was
the author of the Zohar) and he felt himself to be in “the garden of
pomegranates” (an allusion to a Kabbalistic work by Moses Cordovero). Jung relates that he himself became the beatitude of the
“wedding of Tifereth
and Malchut,” and that the vision caused him to feel
“as though [he] were safe in the womb of the universe.” Jung later took an interest in Hasidism, and in
his final years went so far as to say that “the Hasidic Rabbi Baer from Mesiritz, whom they called the Great Maggid…
anticipated [his] entire psychology in the eighteenth century.”
I have
explored Jung’s Kabbalistic visions and his interest in Jewish mysticism in
detail elsewhere.
I have argued that while Jung’s psychological perspective is a valuable vehicle
for our understanding of both Jewish mysticism and the notion of coincidentia oppositorum, it is not the
only vehicle, and by no means excludes potential philosophical, theological and
even scientic understandings of Kabbalistic ideas.
Neils
Bohr: The Complementarity of Opposites in Modern Physics
While
mystics of various traditions had for millennia contemplated the oppositions of
thought, and had sought, for example, to dispel them as illusions cloaking a
unified God or Absolute, in the last two hundred years a rational approach to
overcoming these oppositions has emerged, paving the way for a form of
philosophical, even scientific, reason, which avoids the either/or distinctions
of traditional rational inquiry. This trend has found expression among modern
physicists, in particular in the theory of wave/particle complementarity as it
was articulated and interpreted by the twentieth century quantum physicist Neils Bohr. I will
explore Bohr’s thinking on complementarity in some depth, as I believe it has
an important bearing on our own problems in Jewish mystical philosophy.
Citing the
fact that the findings of quantum physics support both a particulate and wave
theory of light and matter, Bohr concluded “we are not dealing with
contradictory but with complementary pictures of the phenomena, which only
together offer a natural generalization of the classical mode of description.” In other words, Bohr tells us that it is only
by thinking two seemingly opposing theories together that we are afforded an
adequate scientific understanding of light and matter. Bohr reminds us that
both “radiation in free space as well as isolated material particles are
abstractions” but that both are “indispensable for a description of experience
in connection with our ordinary space time view.”
Bohr notes
that modern physics leads to a blurring of certain other distinctions that had
earlier been thought to be sharp and clear. Drawing on Heisenberg and others he
speaks of the “impossibility of any sharp distinction between the behavior of
atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve
to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear.” The collapse of a clear distinction between
the instruments of knowing the world and the world itself, between the knower
and the known, subject and object, epistemology and metaphysics, brings physics
close to the insights of mystical consciousness.
Bohr
regarded his “complementarity” as a philosophical position that stretched well
beyond quantum physics, to matters of psychology and biology (e.g. the
controversy between mechanism and vitalism).
With regard to psychology he wrote:
As is well known, many of the difficulties in
psychology originate in the different placing of the separation lines between
object and subject in the analysis of various aspects of psychical
experience. Actually, words like
“thoughts” and “sentiments,” equally indispensable to illustrate the variety
and scope of conscious life, are used in a similar complementary way as are
space-time and dynamical conservation laws in atomic physics.
Bohr’s point is that there is a subjective and an
objective sense and use for most “psychological” terms (e.g. my inner
subjective “thoughts” and the objective “thoughts” or ideas that they are
about), and that only by considering both aspects at once can we develop
understanding in psychology. Bohr tells
us that progress in atomic physics leads us to recall “the ancient wisdom, that
when searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the dram of
existence we are both actors and spectators.” In effect we are both conditioners of the
world as we are conditioned by it.
Bohr was
aware that his thought could lead one to an impression of mysticism. While he denied that his thought led to an
acceptance of logical contradictions in either the world or our descriptions of
it (holding that apparent contradictions only disclose an essential inadequacy
in our philosophical viewpoint)
he did make use of the metaphor of the simultaneous truth of opposites in
describing his and others’ work in quantum mechanics:
In the Institute in Copenhagen, where through these
years a number of young physicists from various countries came together for
discussions, we used, when in trouble, often to comfort ourselves with jokes,
among them the old saying of the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belonged statements so simple
and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The
other kind, the so-called “deep truths,” are statements in which the opposite
also contains deep truth.
Bohr’s position on complementarity seems to have been
that seemingly opposite assertions about reality are, at least on occasion,
both true, and that the affirmation of both “truths” are necessary for a
complete description of the subject (e.g. light, matter, human psychology) to
which they are applied. (It is unclear if he ever held that seemingly opposing
truths were not only complementary but mutually determinative).
For Bohr, the differences between philosophers and
even those between physicists of different schools often have their root “in the
preferences for a certain use of language suggesting itself from the different
lines of approach.”
Bohr held that at times the most complete account of the world is given when we
use language in ambiguous ways that gives latitude to more than one aspect of
the significance of our words.” There is, he held, a mutually exclusive
relationship…between the practical use of any word and attempts at its strict
definition.”
With
Bohr’s comment on the value and necessity of linguistic ambiguity we are ready
to enter the post-modern, deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida.
Deconstruction: the Overcoming of Polar Oppositions
The most recent,
and perhaps most radical, philosophical voices concerned with conceptual
oppositions, have developed an anti-metaphysical relativism that at first
blush, appears to be unrelated (and even opposed) to any form of mysticism,
metaphysics and theology. Philosophers, led by Jacques Derrida
(1932-2004), have argued that the entire history of western philosophy and
religion is actually predicated upon radical distinctions between a wide
variety of conceptual oppositions (God-world, subject-object, inside-outside,
good and evil, etc.) and the privileging
of one pole of each of these oppositions.
These philosophers have called for a post-metaphysical consciousness in
which traditional ideas and values become open to that which they were meant to
exclude and in which we learn to embrace both poles of oppositions and all that
does not fall neatly into the dichotomies that have dominated western thought
for the past 2500 years.
As Howells puts it, Derrida seeks to “to
deconstruct the binary oppositions of Western thinking”
and “evolve new concepts or models that would escape the traditional system of
metaphysical oppositions.”
Though Derrida sometimes writes as if he
considers these oppositions useful tools, to be maintained until better
concepts become available,
it is clear that the overcoming of the various binary distinctions that form
the core of Western metaphysics is a defining, if not the defining,
characteristic of both deconstruction and postmodern philosophy and theology. God-world, subject-object, inside-outside,
word-thing, good and evil, etc. are all distinctions which break down in
postmodern thought. As we have seen many
of these distinctions also break down in the Kabbalah and we might regard the
Kabbalistic symbols as pointing to new concepts that are vehicles for
overcoming the basic binary oppositions in western metaphysics.
However, whereas the Kabbalah generally seeks
to overcome metaphysical distinctions in the service of a higher unity in Ein-sof (which is regarded as a “unity
of opposites’), Derrida, holds that the effort to dissolve oppositions in the
service of a “higher unity” is a subterfuge, which, while pretending to
respect differences in perspectives,
theories, cultures, and ideas, ultimately obliterates these differences in
favor of a preferred “absolute” point of view.
This is the gist of Derrida’s long-standing polemic against Hegel, who
Derrida holds to be the first philosopher to genuinely recognize “difference,”
and the last to make a heroic effort to obliterate it.
The “Supplement”
and the “Undecidable”
Derrida invokes the notion of the
“supplement” in his critique of a totalizing absolute or essence. The
“supplement,” a notion that suggests there is always something else, is designed to disrupt all binary oppositions:
nature/culture, animal/human, child/adult, mad/sane, divine/human, without
creating new integrative models of understanding the subject matters which
these oppositions consider and classify. “Supplementarity,”
by suggesting that there is always something beyond what one encompasses with
one’s vision or refers to with one’s words, undermines the idea that anything
can be fully present to consciousness (what Derrida calls “presence”), or that
one can fully grasp anything’s identity. What something (anything) is, is in
part constituted by that which at first appears “outside” of it, i.e, by that which it is presumably meant to exclude.
Derrida borrows a concept from Godelian
mathematics to further unsettle the notion of an absolute identity and
self-presence. He uses the term “undecidable” to
articulate the idea that there are certain aspects of, or terms in, a text
whose are undecidable and which serve to unsettle the
text they appear in. These undecidable terms mean both
one thing and its opposite, and neither one thing nor its opposite. They do not, however, according to Derrida,
resolve contradiction in Hegelian fashion by constituting a third, integrative
term. Indeed, the ‘supplement’ is itself an “undecidable” in Derrida’s use of the term, as it is neither
essential nor accidental, yet also both.
The key symbols of the Kabbalah are “undecidable” in a sense close to that of Derrida’s. It is undecidable, for
example, whether Tzimtzum is creation
or negation, knowledge or ignorance, good or evil, and whether it is each of
these things for either God or humanity.
For God, Tzimtzum is the creation of the world, but it is also a negation because the world is an
illusion based upon a contraction of the one real being. For humanity, Tzimtzum is creation because humankind owes its existence to the Tzimtzum, but it is also negation, for
it is at the same time humanity’s alienation from the source of being, which is
God. Other Kabbalistic terms partake in
similar undecidability. It is undecidable for example, if the Sefirot/Partzufim
were or are yet to be, whether they are multiple or one, whether Ein-sof is nothing or everything,
outside or at the center (Yosher vs. Iggulim), transcendent or immanent within the human
mind. It is also undecidable whether the Breaking
of the Vessels is a destruction of values or their origin, or whether the
destruction of values is at once their origin.
Essence and Accident, ‘Outside’ and
‘Inside’
Derrida’s interest in oppositions coincides with his
critique of ideals and “essences,” and his criticisms of the correlative idea
that it is possible to arrive at the one “essential” perspective or truth about
a given text, phenomenon or the world as whole.
In this way he is not only opposed to the view that any particular
perspective is absolute, but is also opposed to any Hegelian or other effort to
use oppositions to dialectically generate comprehensive or “absolute” point of
view.
For Derrida, essence is always exposed to accidental
variations that cannot be rationalized or explained through a definition that
covers all cases. For Derrida the accidental features of a given concept or
thing are a necessary, indeed, an “essential” possibility for that thing. For Derrida, the “outside” of a particular
text, concept or phenomenon, i.e. that which the concept is meant to exclude,
is essential to the inside. One
cannot, for example, understand the man
unless one locates man within a differential matrix involving the inanimate,
the animate, the concrete, the abstract and the immortal, as well as the
specific bodily, emotional, intellectual and spiritual features that are
present (accidentally) in one man but which are illustrative of the necessary
accidental features that are present in all men. Thus man is defined in his
essence both by features (the inanimate, the immortal) that he does not possess
and by those that he possesses only “accidentally”. For Derrida, the notion
that what is outside, contrary, and accidental, is both illustrated and
conditioned by the idea that an ‘absence’ (i.e. the past and the future) is
constitutive of ‘presence’ (the present). What is not now, i.e. the past and future, is absolutely necessary in order
to make sense of what is now, and, as
such, an absence is absolutely
necessary to make sense of presence. There are numerous special applications of
this principle. For example, the possibility of forgetfulness
is part of the essence of memory; as a memory not subject to forgetfulness
would, according to Derrida, be an “infinite self-presence,” and not a memory, which must be of something that is no longer present.
Derrida points out that traditional metaphysics
typically sets up a binary opposition and then privileges one term of the
opposition over the other. ‘Essence’ and ‘accident,’ or ‘identity’ and
‘difference’ are
the most general of these binary oppositions, which are then specified in such
further oppositions as being/privation, good/evil, purity/contamination,
logical/empirical inside/outside, meaning/sign, soul/body, and world/language.
While “metaphysical grammar” privileges essence
and subordinates accident,
“deconstructive grammar” allows accident to penetrate and ultimately determine
essence. In violating essence accident becomes a positive condition for the
assertion of essence as essence.
The
Permeability of Concepts
Derrida does not hold the nihilistic view that pure
concepts (being, the world, man, goodness) are drowned or eliminated by
otherness (their opposites, accidental features), only that they are
necessarily permeable to them. A concept must retain a measure of its
identity, otherwise the force of its contamination by or connection to its
opposite is nil. We cannot reduce pure
concepts, the poles of our binary oppositions, to their opposites. Although in the process of deconstructing
certain words and ideas,
certain equivalences appear to be asserted, we cannot simply conflate essence
and accident, being and nothingness, God and man. Derrida does not hold that there is no value
or necessity to pure concepts. He only
writes to instruct us that in using such concepts their purity is not what we
originally thought it to be.
The Kabbalist’s symbolized the permeability of all
concepts in their doctrines of the Behinnot and the interpenetration of the Sefirot. In short, these doctrines, as expressed by
the Safedian Kabbalist,
Moses Cordovero (1522-1770) assert that none of the Sefirot are “pure,” and that each Sefirah contains within itself an
element of each of the others. Chesed (Kindness)
for example, is actually composed of each of the Sefirot in combination with Chesed, so that it is composed of the Chesed of Chesed, the Gevurah or Din (Strength, Judgment) of Chesed, the Tiferet or Rachamim (Beauty, Compassion) of Chesed, etc. The doctrine of the
interpenetration of the Sefirot
anticipates the “monadology” of Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz
(1646-1716) as well as Nietzsche’s famous dictum that everything in the world
is integrally related to everything else, and that each of the world’s concepts
and values must be understood and developed in connection with each of the
others.
Cordovero, who was the leading Kabbalist
in Safed prior to Isaac Luria,
held there to be an infinite number of aspects (behinnot) within each Sefirah. Further, Cordovero
held the (then) radical view that each of these “aspects” are dependent upon
the point of view of the one who perceives or comprehends them. As such his theory anticipates postmodernist
thinkers who regard reality to itself be a function of the constructions placed
upon experience. In Cordovero we
find a doctrine of the permeability of essence that clearly anticipates and in
some ways rivals that of Derrida.
Opposition in Derrida and the Kabbalah
As we have seen, the Kabbalists,
and in particular the Chabad Hasidim who we have discussed in some
detail, held that everything in the world exists in coincidentia oppositorum, that the infinite God (Ein-sof) as well as each of the archetypes of creation (the Sefirot) are as Azriel
put it, a “union of opposites,” the poles of which are constitutive of each
other. While Derrida is clearly
skeptical of any ultimate union, his position is actually dialectical in a similar way. By holding that the outside is
essentially constitututive of the inside, and that
all essences (i.e. all concepts) are essentially permeated by the opposites
that they are designed to exclude, Derrida becomes part of a tradition, one
that was maintained by the mystics, which provides a counterpoint to the
Platonic view that concepts must have clean boundaries that are uncontaminated
by their opposites or by so-called accidental properties. This tradition, by invoking the notion of coincidentia oppositorum, or “mystical
paradox,” holds that a proposition and its opposite can at the same time both
be true. One implication of this view is
that ideas have permeable boundaries, and that such permeability is essential
to their very articulation as ideas. A
number of authors have argued that Derrida is linked to mysticism through his
approximations to apophantics or negative
theology. I believe that he is also linked to mysticism
through his dialectics as well, via his views that the essential is necessarily
permeable to the accidental, that identity is permeable to difference, and that
each pole of the traditional metaphysical oppositions are penetrated, if not
determined by, their ‘other’. This
overcoming of oppositions and polarities actually links deconstruction with a
tradition that begins in ancient China and India, finds its earliest occidental
expression in Gnosticism and reaches profound expression in the theosophical
Kabbalah and Hasidism. It also links
Derrida to Hegel, and despite differences on many critical points, to Carl
Jung. Derrida’s dialectics differs from both that of Hegel and Jung in its refusal
to strive after a totality (a metaphysical absolute in Hegel’s case and an
individuated self in Jung’s) but it shares with these thinkers a relentless
pursuit of opposites that are to be discovered at the core of presumably pure
concepts and ideas.
We will have occasion to return to Derrida later, when
we examine the demise of the signifier-signified distinction (the distinction
between words and things). There we will see that the demise of this
distinction (and the demise of its demise!) is critical to a contemporary
philosophical understanding of coincidentia
oppositorum.
Understanding the Mystical Paradox
We
are now, after our brief survey of the history of coincidentia idea, in
a better position to ask whether it is possible to rationally comprehend
the paradoxes of Jewish mysticism, e.g. that God creates humanity and humanity
creates the divine, that the world is both an illusion and reality, that Ein-sof is and is not
identical with the world, that creation is at the same time a negation, that
values must be destroyed in order to be actualized? Mystics of various persuasions have generally
held that such paradoxes are the best means of expressing within language,
truths about a whole that is sundered by the very operation of language itself.
Any effort, it is said, to analyze these paradoxes and provide them with
logical sense is doomed from the start because logic itself rests upon
assumptions, such as the laws of “non-contradiction”
and “the excluded middle,” that are violated by the mystical ideas. Indeed, Stace has argued that mustical
truths are essentially “alogical”, inasmuch as they
apply to unity, whereas logic applies to, and indeed defines the nature of,
multiplicity.
Hegel was perhaps the last great
speculative philosopher to hold that the identity of opposites could be
demonstrated rationally. His view that coincidentia oppositorum yields a logical principle was treated with such
scorn by later generations of philosophers that the idea of finding a
rational/philosophical parallel to the mystic quest became an anathema to
serious philosophers. Even W. T. Stace, who was
highly sympathetic to mysticism (and originally sympathetic to Hegelian
philosophy) eventually came to the view that in trying to make a logic out of
the coincidence of opposites Hegel fell “into a species of chicanery.”
According to Stace, “every one of [Hegel’s] supposed
logical deductions was performed by the systematic misuse of language, by
palpable fallacies, and sometimes…by simply punning on words.” Stace, who early on wrote a sympathetic (but now much
maligned) book on Hegel’s system, gave up the idea that coincidentia oppositorum could be shown to be a rational principle,
holding that “the identity of opposites is not a logical, but definitely an alogical idea.”
It is
thus with a certain trepidation that in the following sections, I offer two
strategies or models that I believe will enable us to comprehend in rational
terms how the overcoming, or simultaneous assertion of opposite, apparently
contradictory, ideas can provide a more complete account of both particular
phenomena and the “world as a whole” than the privileging of one pole of an
opposition and the exclusion of the other. The first of these models is
“cartographic” and the second “linguistic,” but each are founded broadly on the
view that representation sunders a unified theological or metaphysical
whole. It is my hope that the model I
offer can provide a degree of insight into the Kabbalistic/Hasidic view that
both God and every actual thing in the world is a coincidence of opposites.
Model 1:
Lessons from a Two-Dimensional World
The first model can best be
introduced via an analogy, one that is derived from Edwin Abbott’s 1884 book, Flatland. Our analogy we will prompt us to temporarily
adopt a perspective on the world that is less
complete than our own. (In Kabbalistic terms, we will be compounding the
effects of the Tzimtzum --the
contraction and concealment which the Kabbalists held
gives rise to both partial ignorance and the finite world.) The process of
working out certain conundrums about the physical world from a more limited
perspective than our own will, I hope, shed considerable light on certain
metaphysical and theological questions that are difficult to resolve from
within our actual epistemic situation.
Imagine for a moment a world
that is virtually identical to the world we live in, but for the fact that the
inhabitants are unable to represent, or even conceptualize, anything in more
than two dimensions. It is not necessary
that we fully imagine ourselves into this world, only that we accept the fact
that even though the inhabitants of this world live in a world of three dimensions,
they can only conceptualize themselves within two (in much the same manner that
we, for example, cannot conceptualize the curvature of space-time, or the
existence of extra dimensions that modern physics insists complement the three
[or four] of human experience).
One of the consequences of the
inability to conceptualize experience in more than two dimensions (and the most
important consequence for our current purposes) is that all representations of
the spherical earth would be constructed in two-dimensions rather than three. In short, our “2D people” would have maps but
no globes, and, however advanced their knowledge about their world, they would
be continually faced with the epistemic problem of having to represent a round,
spherical earth, on a flat, two-dimensional plane. This is, in fact, precisely the problem we
have in creating our own maps, with the exception that, unlike the ‘2D people’,
we have the capacity to represent the earth synoptically with a globe, and
thereby immediately intuit the limitations of our two-dimensional cartographic
projections.
It has long been a principle of
cartography that it is impossible to perfectly represent a spherical earth on a
two-dimensional plane. Every
cartographic “projection” of the whole earth suffers from one or more serious
defects. In the so-called “Mercator” projections, for example, the lines of latitude
and longitude, which are parallel on the globe, are kept parallel, but only at
the expense of creating gross distortions in the size and shape of land masses
near the earth’s poles. “Polar
projections” solve this problem but distort the size and shape of land masses
near the equator, and create the further problem of requiring two circular
projections, two maps in order to represent a single world. Certain, so-called “equal-areas” projections
create the impression that there are huge ‘gaps’ in the earth, which are
arbitrarily but conveniently placed in the oceans, creating the so-called
“flattened orange peel” effect. Like the Mercator
projection, these maps suffer from the problem of non-continuity at the
equator, and as with all cartographic projections, one is unavoidably left with
the impression that the world is flat and bounded by an edge; children often
wonder what lies past that edge, and the ancients speculated that one could
perhaps fall off into an abyss.
(Actually, the space beyond the edge of a full-world cartographic
projection is an artifact of the means of representation, and from within the
scheme of the map, strictly speaking, does not exist. One would imagine, however, that the 2D
people might have various theories concerning this region of “non-being”).
For us, each of the various
two-dimensional projections of the world is a ‘perspective’ upon the
three-dimensional earth: each is suited to a particular purpose, and each has
the practical advantage of being amenable to major increases in size and detail
without concomitant geometric increases in their bulk. Their limitations are, however, readily
apparent to us precisely because we can compare them to the “perfect”
representation of the three-dimensional globe.
Our “two-dimensional counterparts” however, have no such recourse to
such a perfect model, and we might imagine that their various maps would, for
them, engender a number of scientific and philosophical puzzles, which they
would seek to resolve through a variety of conjectures and theories, just as
our inability to see the world sub-species
aeternae generates scientific and metaphysical
theories designed to reconcile our various perspectives on a reality much
broader than the earthly globe.
One particular feature of the
two-dimensional people’s descriptions of the world is that they would naturally
be prompted by their projections into offering a number of interesting
propositions about the world as a whole.
For example, cartographers from the “2-D” world, might argue (and they
would be correct in doing so) that each of their projections were complete maps of the world. Likely they would also realize that two (or
more) projections were mutually corrective in that the distortions of the first
were not present in the second, and vice versa.
For example, the Mercator projection gives the
misleading impression that the equator is non-continuous and that land masses
at or near the poles are immense. The
dual polar projection corrects for these defects, though it has deficiencies of
its own (not the least of which is that it gives the impression of two earths
as opposed to one), and these defects are in turn ‘corrected” by the Mercator projection.
In considering their various
projections, some of the 2-D people might be inclined to hold that one or the
other of their maps were “true” and that the others were either false or
imperfect approximations of their favored forms of representation. Others, less
inclined to such dichotomous thinking, might hold, for example, that both their Mercator
and polar maps were valid, that the
world was both one and many, linear yet curved, rectangular yet circular,
broken yet continuous at the equator, with parallel lines of longitude that are
nevertheless widest at the equator and converge near the poles, etc. In short, their forms of representation might
prompt them to utter a number of paradoxical, seemingly contradictory ideas
about their world that their limited epistemic position would make very
difficult or even impossible for them to express or resolve in any other
manner. (Further, as I have suggested
above, their limited form of representation might prompt them into uttering
such other propositions of variable merit as the world lays situated against
the background of non-being, that it changes with the perspective of the
observer, that at points it is both infinitely extended and minutely small,
that there are as many “worlds” as there are perspectives, and that the idea of
“one world” is not a given, but a construction or achievement.)
Certain philosophers in the 2D
world might argue (as certain 3D thinkers argue in our world) that the various
propositions derived from maps are simply an artifact of language and
representation, that the dichotomous thinking, arising in cartography, though
necessary for practical purposes (i.e. map-making) leads to metaphysical
conclusions that are neither justified nor necessary, or that the dichotomous
expressions and points of view are permeable to, and actually dependent upon,
one another. In short certain philosophers might hold (as do mystics and Wittgensteinians) that the world is inherently distorted
through our efforts to represent it, and others might argue (as Neils Bohr did with respect to wave-particle physics) that
in order to think about the world as a whole one would need to actually think
that seemingly contradictory maps were both true (and complimentary).
The analogies with our
own epistemic predicament should by now be amply clear. Like the 2D people, who have no synoptic
means of representing the earthly globe, we have no synoptic means of speaking
about or representing such totalities as God, man, and the universe. We have perspectives on all of these matters
but no super-perspective from which we can gain a perfect, integrated point of
view. Our conceptions of the world are
of necessity expressed via a series of dichotomies, but on closer analysis,
these dichotomies, though necessary, are seen, at least by certain mystics and
philosophers, to be either misleading or “permeable” to one another and
interdependent. On this view, creation is interdependent with negation; values
are interdependent with their own abrogation; truth is interdependent with error,
God is reciprocally dependent with humanity, good is interdependent with evil,
language is completely interdependent with, and not fully distinguishable from
the world, etc. Indeed, these are the
very reciprocities that constitute the Kabbalistic/Chabad, and to certain
extent, postmodern world-view. However,
whereas the postmodern tendency is to avoid any hint of synopsis or totalization, the Kabbalistic/Chabad view is that such
reciprocities between dichotomous conceptions, like the reciprocities involved
in the 2D maps we have been discussing, point to a single, unified cosmos,
which for the Kabbalists is a union of our
necessarily partial perspectives upon it.
Our failure to see or intuit this unified world is akin to the failure
of our hypothetical 2D people to intuit the globe they live on; like them, we
can only approximate a synoptic perspective through an extensive analysis of
the reciprocity of our many partial and seemingly contradictory, points of
view.
The
Coincidence of Opposites: From Analogy to Analysis
The cartographic model
described above, like Neils Bohr’s philosophy of
“complementarity,” suggests that our subject matter (in our case the universe
as a whole) and the nature of our representations are such that in order to
speak about things as a whole, we must describe them using two, seemingly
contrary descriptions. However, this model merely provides an analogy, one that I hope renders
plausible the idea that in order to understand God, humanity and the world as a
whole, we must surrender our dichotomous thinking and think two or more
seemingly contradictory thoughts at once. Now, I would like to offer the
beginning of an analysis of why such
bilinear thinking is necessary in philosophy and theology.
Elsewhere I have
attempted such an analysis with regard to perspectives on the human mind in psychology. There I suggested that a synoptic view of the
human mind can only be attained once we recognize the mutual interdependence of
such dichotomies as determinism and free will, objectivism and constructivism,
facts and interpretations, individualism and collectivism, and public vs.
private psychological criteria. Here I
will suggest how a similar analysis is necessary with respect to certain metaphysical and theological ideas, and further that such an analysis is
necessitated by the very nature of linguistic representation.
As we have
seen, a close examination of major symbols of the Lurianic
Kabbalah, symbols that were adopted by the Chabad Chasidim, reveals that they
each cut across, and are in effect “undecidable” with
respect to one ore more of the classic dichotomies of western metaphysics, and
that each expresses an understanding of one or more of these dichotomies as a coincidentia oppositorum. The most important of these symbols is Ein-sof, literally “without end”, which
the Kabbalists use to indicate the metaphysical
ground of both God and the cosmos, and which cuts across the dichotomies of
being and nothingness, universal and particular, origin and end, divine and
human, personal and impersonal, and faith and disbelief. It is almost as if the
Kabbalists invoke the term Ein-sof to point to a “metaphysical whole” that is unavailable to
us in the same way that a three dimensional globe is unavailable to the
hypothetical “3-D blind” denizens of “Flatland.” Just as the globe is a physical whole “prior” to its being
sundered into an indefinite array of imperfect cartographic projections (maps),
Ein-sof is a metaphysical whole prior to its being sundered into a variety of
imperfect conceptual dichotomies that seek to represent God and the world. In each case, a primal, inexpressible whole,
has been ruptured by the very system of representation that seeks to express
it; the globe is ruptured by the system of representation that seeks to represent
a 3-dimensional sphere in a 2-dimensional plane, and Ein-sof is sundered by the very system of representation (i.e.
language) that seeks to speak of a unity, but which has dichotomy and
distinction as the very condition of its expressing anything at all.
As we have
seen, in the case we have been examining, cartography, it is the system of representation, the attempt to
represent three dimensions on a two dimensional plane, that sunders the globe
into a series of only partially adequate and seemingly contradictory maps. Is
it possible that the metaphysical case follows the cartographic and that our
inability to comprehend the world and cosmos as a unified whole is a function
of our attempts at linguistic representation?
The Dialectic of Facts and Interpretations
In order to address this
question we must reflect at some length on the nature of linguistic
representation itself. When we do we realize that coincidentia oppositorum come into play with the advent of
language, and are thus at work the moment we attempt to assert anything
whatsoever. While we will have occasion to explore several such coincidentia,
I will first focus my attention on two aspects of language: its tendency to fix
a reference on specific objects in the world (and thus delineate facts), and the opposite tendency for it
to be subject to an indefinite number of (re)interpretations. Indeed these two tendencies lie at the foundation
of two very different pictures or theories of how language functions in
relation to the world. The first, which
I will call the “traditional” theory (or theory of “fixed meanings”), holds
that words in language are grounded, at least in their primary, denotative
meanings, in specific objects and concepts, such that there is a direct
relationship between words and things, or between statements (or sentences) and
worldly states of affairs. Two prominent
exponents of this view were St. Augustine and the twentieth century
philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in the early phase of his career
expounded what came to be known as the “picture theory” of language.
The “picture theory” is implicit in much traditional philosophy, theology and
metaphysics. The second theory (which I will call the theory of “unfixed
meanings”), which has been advocated by early 20th century linguists
such as Saussure, the postmodernists (and by
Wittgenstein in the latter phases of his career) holds that language is
completely autonomous, that the distinctions it makes are not essentially tied
to pre-existing entities and concepts, and that its assertions do not delineate
inviolate “facts”. On this view, the
distinctions made by language are simply a function of the differences between words and the uses to which we put them , and
the meanings of words and sentences do not have a fixed relationship to things
or states of affairs in the world. While
the theory of “fixed” meanings lies at the core of traditional metaphysics and
theology, the postmodern theory of unfixed meanings has been used to deconstruct
the very possibility of an absolute metaphysics or theology. I will here argue that each of these theories
of language, like the Mercator and Polar projections
of a three dimensional globe, are equally necessary and mutually correcting
points of view upon the subject matter they are designed to explain.
Interestingly, both points of view on language are
found amongst the Jewish mystics. On the one hand the Kabbalists
held that the name of a thing completely fixes and captures its essence; on the
other hand, they held that all words and propositions are subject to an
indefinite series of re-interpretations.
As an example of the first view, Schneur Zalman of Lyadi
(the first Lubavitcher Rebbe) held that everything in
the world, including inanimate objects such as stones, water and earth, has a
soul or spiritual life-force which is to be found in the letters of divine
speech from which they and their names are composed. Basing himself on a Kabbalistic tradition
dating back to Sefer ha-Bahir that
“the name of a thing is that thing itself,”
Schneur Zalman holds that “The name by which (a thing) is called in the Holy
Tongue is a vessel for the life force.”
This view that all created things have a linguistic essence, can be
traced at least as far back as the Talmud, where it is reported that Rabbi Meir could grasp the nature and character of an individual
simply by knowing his name.
Thus a traditional, essentialist view of language is a very significant strand
in Jewish thought in general and Jewish mysticism in particular.
On the
other hand, there are also equally strong tendencies in the Kabbalah that go in
the opposite direction. Gershom Scholem has described what he refers to as the Kabbalistic
view of the “unlimited mystical plasticity of the divine word,” and quotes from
the Kabbalist Azulai to the
effect that each time a man reads a given verse of Torah the combination of its
linguistic elements change in response to the call of the moment, resulting in
the creation of new Torah meanings. More recently, Moshe Idel,
building upon his earlier exposition of the exegetical methods of the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia
(1240->1291), has detailed the Kabbalist’s preoccupation with the infinite
interpretability of language in general and the Torah in particular. Idel describes how Abulafia
advocated a form of free association to the rearranged letters of the Torah
text, thus yielding an interpretive latitude that was unheard of amongst
traditional Torah scholars and exegetes, and even amongst contemporary deconstructionists.
Many Kabbalists, while not quite as extreme in their methods as Abulafia, held views suggestive of a radical deconstruction
of the biblical text and its traditional meaning. For example, the Safedian
Kabbalists held that there are 600,000 aspects of
meaning to the Torah, corresponding to the number of Israelites present at the
revelation at Sinai, and hence to the number of “primordial souls” present in
each succeeding generation. Some Kabbalists held
that the Torah was originally revealed as an incoherent scramble of letters
which later rearranged themselves in response to historical events. The Lurianist, Israel Sarug, held
that the Torah manifests itself in different ways in different levels of spiritual
and material existence. At the highest
level (the world of “Atziluth”) it exists as all
possible combinations of Hebrew letters, thus adumbrating the set of all
possible conceptual/linguistic worlds. Similar views of the Torah’s plasticity are
attributed to the founder of the Hasidic movement, Israel Baal Shem Tov.
By understanding the
reciprocal relationship between
strict representationalist and more plastic points of
view on language, we can not only gain insight into the controversy between postmodernism
and traditional philosophy, but also begin to gain a deeper understanding of
the Kabbalistic/Hasidic theory of achdut hashvaah.
Whereas
traditional theories of semantics held that (at least some) linguistic terms
must have fixed meanings, postmodernists such as Wiitgenstein,
Derrida and Foucault have held that no meanings are fixed and that all
linguistic terms are always subject to reinterpretation. These later theorists
have held that the meaning of any given term is not, as traditionally assumed,
determined by its reference to or representation of, some thing (or
‘signified’) in the (extra-linguistic) world, but rather by the manner in which
the term is used or the behavioral and linguistic context within which that
term appears. Derrida and other
postmodernists took up Saussure’s structuralist
claim that a term’s significance is a function of its difference from all other
terms in a linguistic system, as well as by its position within a diachronic
chain of linguistic signs. As the
totality of the system is not determinate, and the contextualizing linguistic
series is potentially infinite (e.g. what Shakespeare wrote is continually
being recontextualized by generations of
interpreters) no sign or term can be said to have a determinate meaning. Similarly, Wittgenstein held that a term’s
meaning is determined by its use in a “form of life,” i.e. a linguistic-social
activity within which that term has a function or role. Since the variations in human forms of life
are infinite or nearly so it is impossible to specify the total context that
will once and for all fix the meaning of any given utterance or text. The implication of this view is that there is
no hope of arriving at a solid foundation for truth and meaning and, hence, no
hope of establishing an ultimate perspective upon, or “truthful” account of,
the world.
Traditionalists
counter that unless some terms are fixed in their meaning, communication itself
would be impossible; that the simplest of utterances, would be infinitely
re-interpretable and there would thus be no way of meaning or referring to
anything whatsoever. Since we obviously
do mean and refer, and our words do have profound and predictable effects,
there is no doubt that meanings are indeed fixed, at least in a relative sense.
Consider
the possibility of a coincidentia
oppositorum between these two points of view regarding the anchoring of
linguistic significance. Might it not be the case that the very idea of fixed
meaning requires its opposite, indefinite interpretability, and vice versa?
I
think it is easy to see how the notion of unfixed, indeterminate, indefinitely
interpretable significance is dependent upon at least some aspects of meaning
being fixed. This is apparent simply on the grounds of the traditional arguments
in favor of anchored significance. If no
terms were fixed, at least for the purposes of a specific communication,
language would be unable to perform the functions it obviously performs so
well. I think, however, that the
traditional view runs aground by holding that the meaning of a given term must
be fixed for all occasions in which that term is used. Wittgenstein, for example, in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus,
had already realized that no actual terms could fulfill the demand for
absolutely fixed meanings, so he hypothesized that underlying natural language
there were certain invisible, inaudible, unwritable
“elementary propositions” and “names.” which referred to equally ineffable
”atomic facts,” and which performed, on a metaphysical level, the function of
anchoring language to a determinate reality. One might be tempted to regard the
Kabbalists’ Otiyot Yesod (the Primordial Letters, which in the Kabbalah
are said to be primal units of meaning as well as sound) or the Sefirot, which are said to be mirrored
in God, the world, language and the human mind, as such underlying anchors of
meaning and significance (and in a certain limited sense this view is
illuminating). However, before adopting this view, we should briefly examine
why the very existence of such anchored meanings was later challenged by
Wittgenstein himself, and replaced by the “meaning as use” perspective of his Philosophical Investigations. (It was also, as we will see, challenged by
the Kabbalists themselves!) Wittgenstein came to the
simple realization that any candidate
that we propose as an anchor of significance will itself be subject to recontextualization and thus further re-interpretation ad infinitum. Because any given word or sentence is continually heard or read
by different subjects in different linguistic, social and psychological
contexts, there is absolutely no way of fixing its meaning for all time.
Wittgenstein’s
apparent error in the Tractatus
was to hold that language must be fixed in
an absolute sense. In actual practice linguistic meaning is only fixed in a
relative sense, in the context of specific utterances or types of
locutions. As speakers we are, as it
were, continually dropping temporary anchors with our use of terms. While the
word “moon” can mean many different things, in certain contexts (e.g. those of
astronomical observation) it takes on the character of a relative anchor around which other terms may vary.
If
there were no such relatively fixed meanings there could be no unfixed meanings
as well. If all
words were continually open to reinterpretation, no one could offer a coherent
interpretation or understand any utterance whatsoever. There would be an infinite regress of doubt
and misunderstanding even with respect to such commonplace locutions as “I am
hungry” or “Please pass the salt.” Further, without some fixed meanings it
would no longer make sense to speak of different points of view,
interpretations, or perspectives; for what would these interpretations and
perspectives be about? Thus the very
notion of interpretation (i.e. unfixed meaning) is itself dependent upon, at
least some, terms and meanings being fixed.
Conversely,
the idea of a fixed interpretation is itself actually dependent upon non-fixed
or interpretive significance. This
proposition is somewhat harder to understand than its converse, but the basic
point is that without interpretive
meaning we would never arrive at general concepts and hence would never arrive
at any significance or meaning whatsoever.
To
see why this is the case, let’s assume, for the moment, the truth of the
traditional theory of absolutely fixed representations. What would such a
system of representation be like? Again we must ask what “elements” in the
world would our words presumably correspond to? The objects of common-sense perception? The
objects of natural science? The problem we run into is that any objects we can
name as the supposed fixed referents of our terms are themselves culturally and
linguistically constructed and defined.
It is hard to see how any of them could serve as the essential elements
or “natural kinds” to which our terms unequivocally refer. We might consider sensations (e.g. red,
heavy, cold) as the candidates for our fixed referents, but it becomes
difficult to see how pairings between words and sensations can lead to the
objects of ordinary and scientific language, without considerable construction
and interpretation. Besides, it is hard to comprehend how such sensation
vocabulary can even be communicated outside of reference to things (e.g. a red flower, or a heavy rock). All of these
problems are familiar enough; they are among the standard difficulties involved
in any effort to create a representational theory of meaning, whether grounded
in common-sense, science or human sensations.
However,
let’s further assume that each of these problems have somehow been surmounted
and we have our fixed linguistic representations. X word means this sensation, Y word means this
object, Z word means this event. How
is it that we can then move from a particular
named thing to a kind of sensation,
object, or event? How does a child, for example, learn that when an object
pointed to is said to be a “pencil” or a “person” that these are not proper
names (or terms referring to particular aspects of the object) but are instead
names of a whole class objects (pencils, persons) of which the particular
object pointed to is just one example?
If the word “person” is to even develop its fixed meaning (as referring
to the class of human individuals) how can this occur unless its original fixed
particular meaning, is unfixed and interpreted
to cover a class? (If one asserts that
our original fixed meaning [of say the word “human’] already covers a class,
how does it come to refer to a series of actual and possible
individuals—Socrates, Sherlock Holmes—unless its meaning is also unfixed, so as
to be applicable to an indefinite range of cases and not just a “general”
object?) The very idea of a fixed,
representational theory of meaning, requires its opposite, the non-fixed,
interpretive theory of meaning, to assure that a fixed term applies to a wider
class and not just a particular case. The application of terms to such a wider
class is itself neither fixed nor automatic, and indeed the growth of language,
and the growth of human knowledge involves a continual reinterpretation of
classes, which, in effect, corresponds to the reformulation of ideas. What counts, for example, as “ a dinosaur,” “a disease,” “an atomic element,” “a pain,”
“a human right,” and even “a human
being,” is constantly being reinterpreted by the various scientific and
cultural institutions that make use of these terms. The class of objects to which a particular
term refers is not a rigid, inflexible class, but an ever-shifting one, wholly
dependent upon contexts of interpretation. As has been repeatedly pointed out
by Kuhn and others: even the “facts” of science are already laden with theory
and interpretation.
We
have thus arrived at a coincidentia
oppositorum at the core of our
investigation of what it even means to assert or speak about anything
whatsoever. We can conclude that the very notion of unfixed meaning, of the
infinite recontextualization and reinterpretability
of language that postmodernism has brought to our attention, is (as the
traditionalists assert) dependent upon the possibility of fixed,
representational significance, but also that the very possibility of such
representational significance is itself dependent upon meanings becoming
unfixed and interpretively applied to a larger class. Data is necessary in order for there to be interpretations, but interpretations are equally necessary
for, and lie at the very core of, data. These two ideas exist in coincidentia oppositorum.
As
with all philosophical dichotomies we go astray when we attempt to latch onto
one pole of an opposition and assume its truth excludes the truth of what we
presume to be its opposite. We must
develop a form of thinking in which we intuitively recognize that when we have
grasped onto one pole of such a dichotomy we have already and necessarily
grasped its opposite as well. Our desire
to eliminate one pole of a philosophical dichotomy is akin to “keeping the
circle but dispensing with its circumference.”
Our tendency to dichotomize, while it often provides us with insight
into the nature of our subject matter, seduces us into thinking that one pole
of our dichotomy must be true and the other false. From a philosophical (and theological)
perspective it is better to conceptualize truth as one, and to think of our
dichotomies as artifices designed to precipitate out temporary distinctions
from what in actuality is a unified whole.
Kabbalistically, the dichotomizing tendencies of thought are a
function of language, and are indeed an aspect of the Tzimtzum, the concealment of Ein-sof. Theologically, we must take an approach that
is akin to the Buddhist “middle way,” seizing hold of both poles of our
dichotomies whenever our thinking tempts or impels us to choose only one.
The coincidentia oppositorum between fixed (“fact”) and unfixed
(“interpretation”) theories of meaning is paralleled in postmodern thought by
another coincidence between (1) the traditional and common sense view that
there is a real distinction between words and things and (2) the deconstructive
(and Jewish mystical) view that the signified (thing) is just another signifier
(word). The theoretical collapse of
the signifier-signified distinction, and the practical restoration of this distinction, is an important aspect
of Derrida’s philosophy that is of significance for our Kabbalistic/Hasidic
understanding of God and the world as a coincidence of opposites.
Model 2:
Overcoming the Distinction between Words and Things
The
Chabad Chasidim held that the Tzimtzum,
the act of contraction and concealment which wrought all distinctions and
brought the world into being, was a linguistic
act. According to Schneur Zalman, the Tzimtzum
is a revealing/concealing act in which the infinite, Ein-sof, contracts itself into language, specifically into the
combinations of letters which comprise the so-called “ten utterances of
creation.”
Such contraction into language is both a concealment and revelation of the
divine essence. The Tzimtzum
inaugurates a distinction between language and the world which conceals the
singular unity of Ein-sof but reveals
an infinite multitude of finite objects and ideas. These notions suggest the intriguing
possibility that by undoing the Tzimtzum,
i.e. by overcoming the distinctions between words and things and thus language
and the world, we can return to the primal unity of Ein-sof, the infinite God.
In this
connection we should note that Schneur Zalman’s
understanding of the Tzimtzum arising
through language accords well with the view, suggested by Derrida, that the
most fundamental dichotomy, one that inaugurates the history of western
philosophy is the distinction between the signifier and the signified, i.e.
between words and things. This distinction inaugurates all other distinctions
and, as such, is the very foundation of language and thought. If words could
not be distinguished from the things they refer to or represent, no
distinctions, no ideas, no descriptions whatsoever could be expressed. For these reasons, the signifier/signified or
word/thing distinction is a critical, even foundational “test case” for our
consideration of the coincidence of opposites in philosophical theology. If this distinction can be overcome, if it
can be shown that there is a coincidence of opposites between word and thing
than we will have arrived at an intellectual (as opposed to intuitive) vehicle
for realizing the primal unity (between language and world, subject and object)
that was sundered by creation.
Such a
vehicle is indeed provided by recent philosophers, including Wittgenstein and
Derrida, who have suggested that in spite of the fundamental role that the
distinction between words and things plays in language and thought, this
distinction is philosophically untenable. I will explore the reasoning that
leads to this conclusion below, but for now it is sufficient to comment that it
rests on the observation that the very process of pointing to or referring to a
thing involves an infinite regress of words that disambiguate what one is
referring to, but only relatively and
always within a further linguistic context.
Interestingly,
the Kabbalists themselves questioned the distinctions
between language and both the world and God. Indeed, as we have seen, Moshe Idel has argued that Jacque Derrida’s now famous aphorism
“There is nothing outside the text,” which in 1967 announced the collapse of
the signifier-signified distinction, may actually derive from the Kabbalist, R. Menahem Recanti’s dictum that there is nothing outside the Torah. Recanti, writing in
the early fourteenth century, held “All the sciences altogether are hinted at
in the Torah, because there is nothing that is outside of Her…Therefore the
Holy One, blessed be He, is nothing that is outside the Torah, and the Torah is
nothing that is outside Him, and this is the reason why the sages of the
Kabbalah said that the Holy One, blessed be He, is the Torah.”
Elliot Wolfson has argued that the “obfuscation
between story and event” in both Sefer ha-Bahir and Sefer ha-Zohar led
to a collapse between mashal
and nimshal,
signifier and signified:
In the Kabbalistic mind-set, there is no gap between
signifier and signified, for every nimshal becames a mashal vis-à-vis
another nimshal,
which quickly turns into another mashal, and so on ad infinitum in an endless string of
signifiers that winds it way finally (as a hypothetical construct rather than achronological occurrence) to the in/significant, which may
be viewed either as the signified to which no signifier can be affixed or the
signifier to which no signified can be assigned.
While
the Kabbalists may have intuitively understood that
both the world and God are, to use Idel’s metaphor,
“absorbed” by language, contemporary philosophers have offered reasons why this
must be the case. It will be worthwhile
to review the chain of reasoning that leads to the dissolution of the
signifier/signified distinction in some detail.
In doing so we will see that there is a coincidentia oppositorum not only between words and things
(signifier and signified) but also between the view that the signifier/signified distinction is spurious and the view that this distinction is absolutely
essential.
What does Derrida mean when
he says that the signified is just another signifier, that the “thing in
itself” is itself a sign? We can again
perhaps explicate this best by borrowing a line of reasoning inspired by the
later Wittgenstein. There is a certain class
of words, those naming so-called mental states and processes that can serve as
clear examples of the theory that words do not achieve their meanings by
attaching themselves to things, but rather by the position they hold within a
form of life and language. Consider, if you will, the question of how many
“mental acts and processes” are required in order for you to read and
comprehend this paragraph? Attention, concentration? Surely one must attend to
and concentrate upon the meaning of the words. Memory? Certainly one must
remember the sounds of the letters and the meanings of the words, as well as
recall the beginning of the paragraph to understand its end. Intention? Clearly
one must intend to read and understand. Recognition? In reading we are
constantly recognizing words, meanings and ideas with which we are familiar.
Thought? One can read without thinking, but in that event one wouldn’t
understand what one has read. What of other mental terms? Interpretation,
expectation, perception?..it would seem that nearly
any cognitive term we can think of names a process that is necessary in order
for one to read. However, should we then conclude that there is a process in
the mind or brain corresponding to each of these terms when you read this
paragraph. Wittgenstein might say that the necessity of attention,
concentration, memory, recognition, thought, expectation, intention ,
interpretation, understanding, etc. is a “requirement of the language” rather
than a reference to or description of actual, concrete mental acts and
processes. We have a whole host of mental terms that have meaning by virtue of
their distinctiveness from, and
entailments vis a vis, one another,
but whose application to the “world” is quite tenuous and indirect. The idea
that the signified is in reality another signifier or series of signifiers,
might be said to generalize from cases like this one about “reading” to most,
if not all, of language.
But what about language
that literally points to objects in the material world? When I hold up a pencil
and say “this is a pencil,” the word “pencil” is presumably the signifier and the pencil itself the signified. However, even in this case we might still ask
what it is that I am referring to with the word “pencil”? This is because depending on the context I could hold up a pencil to illustrate an
application or reference of the words “wood”, “yellow”, “writing implement”,
etc. When I point to something and utter
a word, this is not an unambiguous act of reference; my word “pencil” refers,
but it does so only through a series of other words that disambiguate what I am
referring to, which require other words to disambiguate them, and so on,
potentially ad infinitum. While we typically do not need long
explanations in order to discern what someone is referring to when he or she
points and speaks, this is in large measure because as members of a common
culture we already share a language and a whole host of standard
interpretations. (This, by the way, is not the case when it comes to
communications between a small child and an adult; and when a child points to
something it is often completely unclear what the child means). A so-called signified, like “pencil” only has
significance within the context of a social practice and language that
expresses the routes of interest of a certain culture; a pencil is what it is
only in the context of a form of life
in which writing is a significant act, there is a difference between erasable
and non-erasable writing etc. To an
individual of a completely different culture, a pencil may not have the meaning
we assign to it, and any efforts we make to get such an individual to simply
attach the word “pencil” to what we refer to with this term will be fruitless
because ‘pencil’ does not have a place
in his form of life. Hence, when I use
the word pencil (even within my own culture) I am not pointing immediately to
an object or “transcendental signified” but I am rather (implicitly) invoking a
series of other signifiers that disambiguate and explain my use of this term
and which situate “pencil” within a cultural practice/language. The same is true for any other word, including words that designate so-called “natural”
as well as culturally determined objects. It is only within a certain
(culturally conditioned) “language-game” or “form of life” that we regard
“copper” or “tuberculosis”, to take two arbitrary examples, as meaningful
“terms”, “ideas”, “objects” or “natural kinds.” My meaningfully asserting that
“x is copper” invokes a linguistic setting and series of disambiguating
signifiers in the same ways as my saying that “x is a pencil.” Whether the
object of our attention is “cultural” or “natural”, the so-called signified is really another signifier or
series of signifiers ad infinitum.
It is for this reason that it is arbitrary
what we regard as the signifier as
opposed to the signified. Pencil can signify long, wooden graphite
instrument for writing, or the latter can signify pencil. Since our words never directly seize hold of the thing itself, all language simply
involves a reversible chain of signification. Once we regard the so-called
transcendental object as a sign, it becomes arbitrary what we regard as the
sign and what we regard as the signified. In theological terms, if we were to
follow Menahem Recanti and
equate God and the Torah or God and language, we might equally regard Torah/language
as the sign and God the signified or God as the sign and Torah/language as the
signified. The whole of language, we might say, is a comprehensive signifier
for the absolute God, or “God” is the comprehensive signifier for the whole of
whatever can be written or said.
