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Paradoxism
The conviction that language arises as a way of dealing with paradoxical aspects of existentially formative traumas. The deepest truths about existence can therefore only be expressed as consciously constructed paradoxes, or not at all. The ancient paradoxism is represented by among others Heraclitus while Western paradoxism reaches its height with G F W Hegel’s monist ontology.
Mobilist thinking experiences a veritable golden age in Greece during the early Axial Age. The influence from Zoroastrian Iran is considerable. Heraclitus, Greece’s own Zoroaster, lays the foundation for both philosophy.html">process philosophy and paradoxism. He gives priority to sight (mobilism) over hearing (eternalism) among the human senses and direct experience over indirect interpretation. And while he is at it, Heraclitus also creates dialectics; he argues that creativity only can develop and grow where a clear opposition to the prevailing order reigns. Homer’s myths and Aeschylus’ classic drama revolve around holistically thinking people who live in a monist universe, and these ancient texts bear witness to a protosyntheist world view. It is during this period that Thales, the father of the natural sciences, produces the first syntheist tweet in history: All things are full of gods.
According to Hegel, absolute knowledge is nothing other than the fundamental and historically necessary insight that reason is always relegated to a framework within which it must be limited. For Hegel, absolute knowledge is a metaknowledge, an historical consummation of epistemology, which comes down to a humble insight into its necessary built-in limitations. Transrationalism leads to paradoxism, which gets its clearest expression in the Hegelian subject’s insight into its own illusory foundation. The paradoxist subject appears before itself as the starting point and centre of existence, but at the same time is a gaping empty hole; an illusion that arises as a by-product of language and the small child’s need to eternalise, to divide itself and its surrounding world into delimited, cohesive phenomena.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58