09 September 2009
The next day. Facing an incoherent reality.
There were long pauses of silence between our words. The night before she had remarked how good it smelled outside. It was the clear smell of fall and we knew the summer for sure had come to an end. She had brought her cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes outside. I clung to my cigarette as so often before when we had been sitting outside on some stairs talking and smoking. But this morning was different. Our voices so low and dark, her face so closed, and why did she sound so bitter when she said she was sorry she had hurt me? Small, transparent petals came with the wind from the threes nearby, half shining in the half sun, falling in intricate circles. We had never been here before. How stupid of me to belief that all our mistakes together would prevent us from making new ones. There were no general conclusions to draw from our past that applied for the tone in her voice this morning. The air had a different smell, the sunlight a new coolness, my whisky-hang-over an unfamiliar sadness for which none of our old words fitted. Heraclitus was right after all, I thought, with growing fair. You can not step twice into the same river.
The course on the ethical and political philosophy of Kant and Aristotle had students from both camps. On my left I had a girl making arguments in favour of Kant in words so similar to Kants language that I could not even understand half of what she was saying. On my right I had the boy from my home town that claimed that Aristotle's direction was the right one with the same convincing intensity as he described the last Nick Cave concert. Find your truth and stick to it as you find your favourite musician and stick to him. The course literature was a book trying to merge the gap between Aristotle and Kant by a selection of texts that in sum tried to make the claim that Kant in fact was saying the same as Aristotle or that Aristotle in fact was saying the same as Kant, or at least, that they did not directly contradict each other. The one thing the participants and the professor could all agree on was that the claim was not very convincing.
At the last day of the course the professor said something that I still can not get my head around. But all though I can not make perfect sense of it, or perhaps precisely because I can not make perfect sense of it, it has stuck with me. The professor said that he had came to the conclusion that Kant and Aristotle did contradict each other and that they both were right. I was baffled. How could my teacher in philosophy make a claim that was knowingly logically incoherent?
Now my question is a different one: What are the implications of accepting that this contradiction gives a more precise description of the reality than any logically perfect theory? One implication would be the rejection of all the theoretical explanations I have red on war and conflict. If the reality we are living in is one where the contradiction is closer to the truth than the coherent statement, we can not learn from history as long as we continue to reshape it to fit into neat internal logically coherent theories that satisfies our desire to order the reality. You can not step twice into the same river.
She started on her second cigarette and I had nothing more to say. I would not even have been there if it was not for my bike that I had left there the day before. Across the street someone opened a window and what before had been a captured half-heard beat was now the familiar voice of Billie Holiday. But it did not feel familiar. It sounded misplaced and strange. I could not make sense of any of it. As I in silence watched her smoking, the event formed itself into a narrative with the bike as the central element. It all started when I was on my way there. I noticed that something was wrong with the bike, but tried to convince myself that it was probably nothing. While drinking whisky I forgot the whole thing, but by the end of the night, when we were going to the city centre for a last drink, I was not surprised at all when I found my back tire flat. Of course it was flat. As if out of a natural consequence of what had been going on inside the air had gone out, bit by bit, slowly in the darkness. In the end there was nothing left. Useless and flat. When she had finished her cigarette I took my bike and went home, knowing that there was no general knowledge in this narrative. But somehow it spoke for it self.
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