Keith Devens .com

Dialectical tension

You have dialectical tension when your worldview implies two contradictory, or at least competing, ways of thinking about a given topic with no real way to resolve the problem within your worldview. There are many instances of dialectical tension within the history of philosophy, and here are just a few^[1]:

• Free will vs. determinism
• Apparent randomness vs. apparent determinism
• Permanence vs. change
• The mind-body problem
• The rights of the individual vs. the rights of the state
• The tension between universals and particulars
• A priori vs. A posteriori knowledge, and synthetic vs. analytic reasoning

What's interesting is that they're really all instances of the one-many problem, which has really never been solved by secular philosophy. In fact, Bertrand Russell, in his The Problems of Philosophy, considered the one and many problem to be one of the central problems of philosophy (I'll have to find a quote to substantiate this, however). I'd argue that Christianity is the only worldview that can provide a solution to the one-many problem.

This all needs to be fleshed out more... I just wanted to get it started. Many times, posts like this will eventually gain a more permanent home on my wiki.

By the way, I need to expand my categories more. I'm putting this in the Christianity/Religion category, but in my mind the full name of that category is Philosophy/Christianity/Religion. Similarly, for my Opinions/Politics category, the full name in my mind is News/Opinions/Politics.

Footnotes:
[1]: I would like to catalogue more here, because I think most of the history of philosophy can really be understood as people taking one side of the issue or another on many issues of dialectical tension. Consider the split after Descartes between British Empiricism and Continental Rationalism

Permalink | 5 Comments | Tags: Religion | id 4345

16:18 (utc-5)
edited: 16:20 (utc-5)