Chapter 4: The Problem and the Paradox
“In this mass of contradiction and confusion, one finds a very curious common denominator; i.e., that everyone appears to agree that what is actually confronting us is a set of problems.”
“Problem”: Greek word meaning “to put forward”; i.e. to put forward for discussion or questioning an idea that is suggested toward the resolution of certain difficulties or inadequacies.
There are tacit and implicit presuppositions in putting an idea in the form of a problem. These, of course, have to be rational and free of contradiction. One can easily accept a “problem” with self-contradictory presuppositions.
What is the Paradox?
- When something goes wrong psychologically, it is confusing to describe the resulting situation as a “problem”. It’s better to say that that person is confronting a paradox.
- As long as the paradox is treated as a “problem”, the mind can never solve it since it has no solution.
- “The paradox is that whereas one is treating his own thinking and feeling as something separate from and independent of the thought that is thinking them, it is evident that in fact there is, and can be, no such separation and independence.”
- “Root paradox”: the activity of thought is controlled by the very thing that it appears to be trying to control.
What to do with this Paradox?
- “We are not trying to find a procedure that “solves the problem”, instead we should pause and give attention to the fact that our thinking and feeling are dominated, through and through, by a set of self-contradictory demands or “needs” so that as such thinking and feeling prevail, there is no way to put things right.”
- “What is needed is that people be ready to give serious and sustained attention to a paradoxical pattern that has come to dominate their thinking and feeling.”
Examples:
- A man who is very susceptible to flattery and finds the apparent solution of “trying to resist it”, without noticing that the cause was something of the past.
- Human relationships (“needs”, “hurt”, “defense mechanism”)
- Nationalism (everyone cease to treat the enemy as human)
What should we do next in order to improve our society?
- We have seen that the set of punishments or rewards, or any other moral and ethic system has not been producing the desired results; therefore there must be something else.
- We must give attention to the inward dullness and non-perceptiveness which allows us not to notice in the paradoxical thinking and feeling.
- “What is called for, then, is a deep and intense awareness, going beyond the imagery and intellectual analysis of our confused process of thought, and capable of penetrating to the contradictory presuppositions and states of feeling in which the confusion originates.”
- “What is needed is to go on with life in its wholeness and entirety, but with sustained, serious, careful attention to the fact that the mind, through centuries of conditioning (“We ourselves are all right”), tends, for the most part, to be caught in paradoxes, and to mistake the resulting difficulties for problems.”