Paradoxis: Paradox as Praxis

new ways of coming togehter: an essay from Marcus, Yogi and Andrea and an invitation to those who may be interested in joining us as we try and find ways of doing this

Life as paradox.

In every cell of our bodies, since the beginning of life, metabolism simultaneously builds up and breaks down. At every moment of our lived experience, thoughts tussle for dominance and attention in our mind, constructing and deconstructing a turbulent stream of ideas. Every love we’ll ever have must die. Species come and go in the perennial dance of evolution. Every ecosystem on earth complexifies and then simplifies. Every civilization rises and falls.

Life renews itself. This is its meaning. Like the Red Queen, it must run just to remain in place. To keep on becoming, it must continuously cease. Foolish those who wish to live forever: doing and undoing always go together. It is this paradox that generates the friction for our traction in life.

Without this friction, there is no forward drive. Without ugliness, we no longer recognize beauty. Without evil, we can do no good. Without struggle, no breakthrough and no justice.

Some of the most destructive acts force healing. Some of the best-intentioned art is patronizing. None of these are opposites. The opposite of each can also be true.

Paradoxical is the logic of life. It is a strange loop — its image, a Moebius band. Living beings are like springs that wind themselves, our existence geared towards what isn’t.

Goals driven by longings: that is our drive to survive. Unlike dead matter, we must work just to persist. And to persist means to change. We flourish in this tension between the actual and the possible. Resolution means death. There is no synthesis. We strive to act with coherence in any given situation. But too much consistency means stasis. It gets in the way of adaptation.

What would it mean to move beyond the strange loop? What constellations might we find by staying with the tension? By accepting life as good and bad, where no side can overcome.

To be wise is to accept this. To thrive on the tension. Paradox is us. Because it is life. Why not embrace it with all our heart? This is what it means to love life. To do it justice, we develop an ecology of paradoxical practice.

This is not an invitation to be lazy; not in your thinking; not in your actions. We are not into whateverism. Just because we cannot resolve our paradoxes doesn’t mean that anything goes.

Quite the contrary. To live with paradox is playful, yes, but it is serious play. After all, we play for our lives. Not within rules, but with the rules. There is nothing to be won, but everything to be lost. Our aim is to keep playing… as long as we possibly can. And to enjoy while we’re playing.

We don’t deny the rules; but neither do we accept them unquestioned: we recognize and respect them. And then change them anyway.

Remember: to change is to persist. We do not work against our constraints, we work with them. We build and we break. This is how we regenerate ourselves. We ride paradox like a wave, precariously holding the tension between chaos and control. And the tension holds us in return. This is how it becomes a threshold towards that which we cannot yet sense.

Life as performance.

To live is to act. We enact our lives. For ourselves, and for others.

Our first and last action is to keep ourselves alive. To stay in the world, we use nutrients from our environment to build our bodies, we use experiences to build our personalities. At all levels, we metabolize life. We become what is around us. And what is around us is touched by what we are.

We are indeed not who we were five minutes ago. Nor is the world the same, at any given instant. And yet, there is a strange kind of continuity.

Our self is a bundle of activities; and it is also the locus of our experience. We process our lives. We are the source of this process. At the same time, it is what brought us here. We are never fully in control. And still, our drive is the source of our actions. We care. We judge. We are creative. Sometimes, we are responsible; even for the unintended consequences we caused.

These, by the way, may be annoying. But they are also our exclusive opportunity for growth. Reality is that part of our experience that eludes our grasp, and our control. It is by ingesting the unexpected that we transcend ourselves, at every moment of our lives.

Paradox again: we tumble towards that which we do not yet understand. Drawn to the unknown like moths to the light. It frightens us but we cannot let it go.

It is frightening because there is no visible path ahead. Nothing makes sense. To become true philosophers, artists, sages in this world, we must make our way by walking. This is lived practice. This is what it means to perform well for ourselves.

To make our life meaningful, we need to get out of our heads and into the world together. We need to relinquish control. Keats’ negative capability: to be in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Not willful stupidity. (Not ever!) But to foster the recognition of ignorance, of curious non-knowing, that leads to transformation.

Yet, when we enact our lives, we not only perform for ourselves. In fact, we mostly act for others. We need love above all. We are love! We crave social recognition. To achieve it, we slip into many roles. We perform to find authenticity. We create personas and avatars.

This is not new. It is, at heart, what it means to have society; to have civilization. If authenticity means acting in ways that ignore the needs of others, then authenticity be damned. Freedom is not selfishness. It never has been.

We grow with each other, or we do not grow at all. For a society to function, the roles we play must support each other. Humans need to please and be pleased; to challenge and be challenged. True flourishing, true freedom, can only be realized if these needs are met. We choose to constrain ourselves to be free. Yes: a paradox once more.

And another paradox on top of this last one: we have created a society that worships efficiency and productivity. Therefore, to please others, to advance in society, we must play our roles in a maximally consistent manner. Never step out of role: we must function like a cog in a machine.

But this is not human. It suffocates us. To persist is to change. To flourish in our paradoxical manner, we must separate our public persona, the rigid roles we play, and our private personality — our internal entanglement of contradictions, our mess. There must be space for it all. Together, we can reimagine this space.

Unfortunately, with the disappearance of real-world community, and the ever increasing fragmentation and performativity of our public personas, our private space for mess is disappearing and retreating into our heads.

This literally makes us sick, and causes us to lose ourselves, because we can no longer admit to ourselves what our actual problems are, since we’re pretending not to have them. We become the armor we built around ourselves. The effects of this trend are measurable, they are crippling, and they are rapidly getting worse.

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Paradoxis is performing paradox.

This is why we must rediscover and unleash these shared spaces. Not by mediation or mindfulness. Those are solitary practices, even if done in a group. Mediate as you please, by all means! But that’s not what we’re after. We insist on a little help from our friends.

Isn’t this what they are for? Every once in a while, we need to be vulnerable among people. And not the staged vulnerability that passes as emotional drama these days.

It’s not glamorous. And sometimes, it won’t be pleasant. To be vulnerable means to be inappropriate, to be inadequate. We need to not be presentable, but to be seen in all our glorious contradiction. We need to not make sense. We need to not perform, but still be with others.

What we want to build are private circles of trust where we reground ourselves in the dynamics of paradox. We want to muck about, to wallow in it. We want to turn paradox into a skillful art. We want to celebrate contradiction. To glorify it. We want to laugh about ourselves and thereby learn to take ourselves seriously again at last.

In short, we want to develop a praxis of performing paradox. We call it paradoxis.

This is the only way to rediscover the true problems we face — and our place within them.

On second thought: circle may not be the right word though. A circle or loop can rest statically on the ground, perfectly at equilibrium. What we are doing, instead, is riding our strange loop: a Moebius band that, from our own perspective, unwinds into an endless spiral. It faces neither up nor down. It sometimes spirals inward, sometimes outward. And it always takes us somewhere where we are currently not, and never thought we’d ever be.

This strange spiraling journey is our destination. To anchor ourselves in the world, means to let go of firm ground. Need we say it? It’s another paradox we must face … nay, celebrate!

We solemnly recognize that there is nothing but this unwinding, spiraling loop. It can be dizzying.

But like a surfer on the crest of a wave, a new balance can be found. A balance that is process. And this process is adaptive. That’s what grounds us: we learn to surf better. And we know exactly when we’ve achieved a better balance.

Firm ground would only get in the way. As an apt metaphor, think of the wave (and the surfer) crashing on a cliff. The best wave is the one that continues unimpeded.

Paradoxis is exhilarating, but also precarious. This is the kind of tension, the kind of freedom we seek. What better path to a meaningful existence? What better way to celebrate life as art?

Our aim is to center the journey, not its outcome. Yes, it’s a moving center. Or not a center at all. An artful decentering, rather. Art is process, it is activity, not a static object exhibited in a museum or gallery. It is living practice. The kind that stirs things up, within us and around us.

We are on our way, engaged in paradoxis. Will you join us? If you want to embrace and celebrate paradox with us, if you are interested in establishing a new practice, then please do let us know. We are keen to contradict ourselves with you!

In the two podcast conversations we have just published, we discuss our spiraling circles of paradoxis from two distinct perspectives. Only two so public ones far: as the practice grows, there will be many more to add!

by Paradoxis (Johannes Jaeger, Andrea Hiott, and Marcus Neustetter)

Go check out our first public conversations:

Part I: for Love and Philosophy

Part II: For the Zoom ZoNE