"Contradiction isn't compromise"

Episode 2: On embracing our multitudes

ICYMI: Dailyness now has a companion podcast—you can listen to the latest episode on embracing contradiction on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. An edited version of the episode is below if you’d prefer to read along, and you’ll also find the latest batch of daily observations that shaped the episode.

In what ways do you contradict yourself, one day to the next?

The poet Mary Oliver wrote about being three selves at least: she names one self as the child she was, and then she names another as the attentive, social self. As she writes about this self:

“This is the smiler and the doorkeeper. This is the portion that winds the clock, that steers through the dailiness of life, that keeps in mind appointments that must be made, and then met. It is fettered to a thousand notions of obligation. It moves across the hours of the day as though the movement itself were the whole task. Whether it gathers as it goes some brand of wisdom or delight, or nothing at all, is a matter with which it is hardly concerned. What this self hears night and day, what it loves beyond all other songs, is the endless springing forward of the clock, those measures strict and vivacious, and full of certainty.”

Then, she describes the third self: the creative self. This particular self is occasional in some of us, and a tyrant in others—and this self is out of love with the ordinary, it is out of love with time, it has a hunger for eternity. It doesn’t help the world go around, but rather, forward.

This is precisely what Walt Whitman meant in the famous line from Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

But we don’t really offer much regard to our own contradictory selves, our multitudes, because we don’t give much regard to contradiction.

Yet it’s in everything. Our selves, as the poets point out, but also our interactions, our opinions, our desires. It’s also in nature. Society. Politics.

Despite being ubiquitous, we miss the point with contradiction, I think. We see it as something to eradicate, correct, or hide.

But as a lovely new friend told me recently, “Contradiction isn’t compromise”—we can hold two opposing truths. We can inhabit one self without diminishing the other. We can honour rather than deny our multitudes.

So why don’t we?

Thinking about it, I think we evade our contradiction because we worry what other people might think.

In one of my favourite essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, he writes about how an obsession with consistency obstructs our self-trust. In his words: “A reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.”

We don’t want to disappoint other people, or compromise their opinion of us, yet what people think or expect of us have very little to go on—and it’s usually an expired version of selves.

What’s the good of staying foolishly loyal to a past self or word if it’s at the cost of the insights we’ve gained in the present? As Emerson continues:

“But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict something you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgement into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.”

To live ever in a new day, I love that.

I think we all aspire to that, but it’s challenging because we have to be okay with how things change.

To allow for contradiction is to allow for the variances of daily life, the variances in our own selves, the variances in our understanding.

Contradicting our past words or actions isn’t compromising—it’s being open to these variances. We’ve experienced something. We’ve gained new perspectives, we’ve learned something.

In this way, contradiction is the catalyst for change.

This has really solidified for me recently as I’ve been learning more about the philosophy of Hegel, who described contradictions as the very animating force of life.

More on that animating force in a moment, but just a brief introduction to some of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel thinking.

He was a German philosopher of the late 18th and early 19th century, and known to be notoriously convoluted. Thankfully, I’ve had the privilege of being taught by the brilliant Todd McGowan as part of my masters, so have been able to grasp a bit.

As McGowan puts it, Hegel is the philosopher of contradiction—the entire movement of thought is not about solving or getting rid of contradiction, but rather reconciling with the very intractability of contradiction.

Contradiction, for Hegel, is the basic fact of all being—it presents itself at every turn, and is impossible to avoid, even in Hegel’s very philosophy. Sure, he might be convoluted but he’s self-aware.

For Hegel, it’s our ability to recognise contradiction in all things that makes us human. In Hegel’s words: “The subject has the capacity to grasp contradiction through reason by doing so, the subject sees that contradiction is the source of its own being, that it cannot separate itself from what negates it.”

We see this clearly in the example of pain. As McGowan interprets Hegel, to be in pain is to find oneself immersed in contradiction.

Now, of course, no one wants to be in pain. But for the living entities that we are, it’s inevitable. To be alive is to be undergoing some damage, some decay, some pain. And it’s our awareness of this pain that distinguishes us from the natural world. Without this very capacity for awareness, one loses sentience. So while one can wish not to be in pain—this is what most living entities wish for—the complete elimination of pain would entail the elimination of life as well. And therein lies the contradiction. As McGowan puts it:

“Pain provides the key to grasping how Hegel conceives contradiction because it brings together negation and creation, revealing that the experience that negates the living entity is constitutive for the living entity. Without the negation of life, one could not be alive.”

This is what is meant by that animating force I mentioned. For Hegel, we are not only aware of contradiction, but we are always seeking out deeper, ever-increasing contradiction, obstacles or problems. The goal of thought, for Hegel, is to sustain contradiction. As he writes in The Science of Logic, “Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only insofar as something has a contradiction in itself that it moves, that it has drive and activity.”

This goal to seek greater contradictions is mostly unconscious. Interestingly, this is where Hegel coincides with psychoanalysis, which in a nutshell explores the ways in which our unconscious impels us to act against our own conscious wishes.

As McGowan put it, “Consciousness is geared towards solution, but unconsciousness is geared towards undermining the solution.”

So why would our unconscious want to undermine our solution? For the unconscious, each new way of undermining—or failing—is precisely what drives it forward.

If everything was a smooth path, if we could just attain what we wanted, if everything was just pure openness with no obstacle or limit, then we would simply be stuck with more of the same.

In other words, without tension, nothing would happen. We need the clash of contradictions, the obstacles, problems, limits, failures and unconscious undermining to create the very tension that animates us. Tension allows things to move, which is the very definition of desire—it’s our animating force, it’s how we learn, discover, and change. It’s the kernel of all possibilities.

And that’s why I think we can shortchange ourselves if we deny contradiction. If we try to eradicate, correct, or hide our multitudes, we don’t see the possibilities within the failures—we don’t get to the point where we see that the way things don’t work out is always the part of how they do work out.

That’s a great definition of wisdom, really: seeing how things don’t work out is part of how they do.

It’s a cliche, almost. The breakups that led to fulfilling relationships. The job you lost that opened an entire new direction. The mistake an artist makes that ends up defining their style.

We cannot separate a success from a failing, a strength from its weakness, or one side of the self from the other.

That’s what Hegel was able to grasp. As McGowan summarises, for Hegel: “Success involves embracing the contradiction as what animates our existence—no longer seeing victory in the conclusion of the game but in the confrontation that it makes possible.”

There’s something very pertinent for our times here—I think we’re risking something quite profound by shying away from or denying our contradiction.

In our consumer society, we search for these prescriptions to our imperfections, discomforts, failings—we make futile attempts to optimise them away, we beg for someone to tell us what to do, we search for things we can buy to solve our problems.

We lurch towards some ideal, frictionless, contradiction-free future. Yet in doing just that, we veer further and further away from the solution within the problem; the impetus in the obstacle; the new possibilities.

I think loneliness is an interesting example of how our societal view of the problem takes us further away from ourselves. Last week, I went to an exhibition about loneliness at ACCA, which is the first in a series exploring human emotion. In the group show, it was striking to see the ways in which the very prescriptions to our loneliness exacerbate our loneliness.

Our devices are meant to connect us, and yet those same devices perpetuate disconnection. We go into the world to connect, only to be alone together. We crave company, approval, intimacy, yet don’t want to be seen craving.

But what if we just let ourselves be lonely?

What if we allowed the tension of loneliness to give way to new possibilities?

What if we didn’t see our loneliness as a compromise, but as a contradictory and animating force?

In the exhibit, a short film by Gideon Appah features an Akan saying: “To human is difficult”.

That kind of says it all, really. There’s no answer sometimes. To human is difficult, so let it be.

This is what I think Hegel’s philosophy can show us—how the difficulty and the dissatisfaction is constitutive of our being, and we have to reconcile ourselves to that.

We need to acknowledge contradiction so that we can actually do something meaningful with the animating variances it brings.

Because it’s only in noticing the variances in our circumstances, in our opinions, in our knowledge, in our selves, in our days, that we can actually find the harmony within them.

To return to Ralph Waldo Emerson, in that beloved essay:

“There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they each be honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions.”

Be true to whatever self you encounter today, and trust there will be some harmony between them; or, if that fails, there will be something else made possible.

Listen to the full episode of Dailyness on embracing contradiction
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Things from the day

My new podcast is a deepening of a daily observation practice I’ve had for over 1,000 days now—it’s an experiment in presence and connecting the various things I encounter each week or so. Here’s the latest batch that shaped this episode on embracing contradiction.

Monday 20 July

After listening to the first episode of Dailyness, a lovely new friend tells me the idea of loss not being a waste reminded him of something an old housemate once said: a contradiction is not compromise.

“We have the capacity to hold two opposites without diminishing ourselves,” he adds.

Tuesday 21 July

Pondering my friend’s words from yesterday, perhaps we can hold contradictions without diminishing ourselves because we have contradictory selves. I’m reminded of when Marina Abramović said in an interview she has three selves: the heroic strict self; the spiritual self, and the bullshit self—the one we all try to hide. And also how Mary Oliver in the essay Of Power and Time also names three: the child she was; the attentive, social self; and the creative self. And once again, how Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

What are my multitudes? I am ambitious. I am idle. I am an initiator. I am shy. I want to be included, and I want to be left alone. I am physically very strong. I am tired. I am indecisive. I am determined.

Wednesday 22 July

Two of my dear friends recently received exciting new job offers, and coincidentally, both had similar interview experiences. In response to the customary “Do you have any questions?” question, they both asked: “Does anything in my application or this conversation give you pause?”

I think we could all do with pausing more, and inviting others to be open about what might be giving them cause for pause.

Saturday 25 July

Things I wrote down from various artworks and wall labels in the current ACCA show exploring loneliness:

• “The exhibition approaches loneliness not as a problem to be solved, but as a complex state of being: one that can be painful or productive, isolating or connective, fleeting or enduring.”

• “The way sand remembers something without needing to hold it.”

• “So busy thinking about kissing you…”

• “To human is difficult.”

Sunday 26 July

I’m sipping the coffee that my lovely-lover made while I flip through an art book he’d taken from his shelf. “You put together two things that have not been put together before,” a quote from Julian Barnes fills the page. “And the world changes.”

Two things, but also two people. By some chance, coincidence, or maybe some fated bow and arrow, you’re put with a new person and suddenly your world changes.

Monday 27 July

The day gets off to a wobbly start. I spill my latte all over a library book. I interrupt myself with imaginary quandaries. I compare myself to people on the internet.

I find myself longing to be a different version of myself. One that gets into the day’s tasks and doesn’t fumble. But then I remember what I’ve been learning about sublimation—we don’t change, but rather transcend. We can maintain our clumsy, comparison-ridden, longing self, and at the same time, shift it towards something useful.

Tuesday 28 July

Finishing my essay after taking Todd McGowan’s class on Hegel, I’m struck again by this running theme of contradiction. For Hegel, contradiction is not something to overcome, but rather embrace as an animating force. As he writes, “Being itself is contradictory and that we have the capacity to apprehend this contradiction by thinking. Rather than try to eliminate contradiction, subjects attempt to sustain and further it. Contradiction is not anathema to thought, but what animates both thought and being.”

Wednesday 29 July

A friend recently decided to explore a new creative medium, just for fun. This pursuit of fun soon led to coveted opportunity, which is still under embargo, but I think the lesson can be freely shared: do the thing just for fun. It’s all we can ever do, really. Why make it feel so dreary and serious for ourselves, when we can just have fun?

Thursday 30 July

I’m applying for a residency and the theme is silence. Fittingly, I had just read this extract from an interview with the poet Louise Glück: “Block is not a word I would use, because I think there is a necessity to be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so that you will have a different self out of which to write and different news to tell from that space.”

Friday 31 July

Scripting the next episode of Dailyness on the theme of—surprise!—contradiction, I revisit a beloved essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson on Self-Reliance. A quote that doesn’t make the episode, but worth sharing for its use of ‘hobgoblin’ alone:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—’Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’—Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Saturday 1 August

Comedian Meg Jäger opened her solo show A Beautiful Mind by reading an extract from her diary. In her year eleven maths class, anytime someone was absent the teacher would ask the entire class to say something nice about them. I like the idea of developing the habit of being kind behind someone’s back.

Sunday 2 August

Overheard: “I used to think we could shape our destiny, but we’re lucky if we can somewhat shape our own morning.”

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