The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd

Abstract

In this comparative study, Matthew Bagger takes up the challenge to reflect on the role of paradox in Western and Asian religious discourse. In order to find out why religions display a peculiar propensity for paradox, Bagger draws not only on religious studies, but also on philosophy and the social sciences. He offers a naturalistic explanation of religion’s propensity to cultivate and perpetuate paradox and argues that religious thinkers employ paradoxes as the basis for various techniques of self-transformation. Bagger distinguishes between three uses of paradox: (1) cognitive asceticism, which harnesses the discomfort of cognitive dissonance in order to induce suffering or effect abnegation, (2) mysticism, which seeks to transform the self through an extraordinary cognition that ineffably comprehends paradox, and (3) skepticism, which cultivates the appearance of contradiction in order to divest a person of judgments and attachments altogether. These different uses of paradox are explained with reference to the writings of Kierkegaard, Pseudo-Dionysius, Nāgārjuna, Chuang-tzu, and Sextus Empiricus, among others. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 is entitled ‘Introduction: Paradox Without Piety.’ This title refers to the method of investigation: pious attitudes are not to block the path of inquiry. Bagger here informs the reader about the fact that, when paradox entered the English language in the sixteenth century, it simply meant an eccentric opinion, while in contemporary English, the word refers to a self-contradiction. Bagger himself defines paradox as ‘an apparently absurd claim, i.e., a claim that apparently entails a self-contradiction (either formally, materially, or performatively), to which one feels at least some inclination to assent because it is supported by at least one form of epistemic authority that one recognizes’ (3). In what follows, Chapter 1 contains an overview of the structure and the argument of the book. Tailoring Mary Douglas’ sociological theory about taxonomic anomalies, Bagger develops the hypothesis that a thinker’s attitude toward paradox reflects his or her attitude toward the external boundary of whatever social group most preoccupies him or her. Individuals who fear crossing the boundary of their social group find paradox offending and tend to use paradox ascetically, while individuals who find the controlled incorporation of outsiders enriching commonly find paradox revelatory (cf. 10f).