…OPEN…
Stage 65 / Tuesday 28 June / From Población de Campos to Cervatos de la Cueza / 32 km
I entered the province of Palencia yesterday, where I admired all the canals and irrigation ditches. The canal of Castille, among others, brings life to all the fields of cereals and potatoes: this region can boast of being the granary of Spain. It’s a bit cooler to walk along the banks of these watercourses, and my thoughts are scattered like them from the principal rivers coming from the north.
Everywhere there are gates letting the water through or holding it back. Two positions: the lower position zero = gate down, no movement of water; the higher position one = gate lifted, the water stream flows! In other words, it is binary, like for electricity or computer science … and this is also the way my own neurons function, stimulated or not!
Is this binary approach a reason for my difficulties in distinguishing true from false? For the binary blind alley doesn’t allow me to resolve the question of anteriority between the chicken and the egg, one like the other being able to boast of this privilege. Is another approach needed to better grasp the paradoxes apparent in nature, the famous dilemmas between continuity and discontinuity, order and disorder, rest and movement? The last two terms are mutually exclusive: what is resting is not moving, but how to explain the passage in perfect continuity of the immobile green leaf attached to the branch and the dry leaf which detaches itself and falls to the foot of the tree?
Therefore there is not only binary: what “is” and what “isn’t” (immobile or moving—choose!); there is a third possibility: that which “can be,” between apparent opposites and allows the existence of a transitory state, such as the edge of the coin between heads and tails! And hey, here between the believer (God exists) and the atheist (God doesn’t exist), I allow the agnostic to have his/her say (perhaps God exists)!
Thus in swaying between contradictory states and straying into rational trompe-l’œil avenues, assisted by sophism, I am led to think that all and nothing are not irremediably opposable, but on the contrary can be linked in strange ways. I should remain open to such intuitive thoughts, which moreover is what oriental thinkers do when they say: “Error is not the opposite of truth; it is rather an incomplete truth, or another truth!” So, great: no more dogma, therefore no more heresy possible! What open-mindedness, what liberation! Long live the ternary way of thinking, which allows one to be open to the in-between!
Now the agnostic, the doubtful, can enclose himself in his ternary way of thinking as much as he likes. But he indeed risks never concluding, if he has the least desire for research: for if yes, the egg can hatch and give birth to a hen, it can also give birth to a rooster! And the hen without a rooster cannot give an egg which will assure the survival of the species! Can the skeptical then really gain widespread acceptance? This is like “mebbe yes, mebbe no, mebbe neither” … once again ternary! There too we can go round in circles …
Aristotle’s Greek rationalism led to binary thinking, that is to say if two propositions are contradictory, any third way is excluded: one is true and the other false. To that is opposed the idea of a third being included, which permits the famous French motto “liberty, equality, fraternity” to exist, in spite of the complexity of oppositions among these terms. For history is often a witness to many of our contradictory preoccupations between liberty and fraternity, and between liberty and equality. And I also firmly believe that fraternity does not always command equality!
It will never the less be necessary to open the door further to this intriguing way of thinking! For in using this middle road, I am not going to simply debate “God who is” and “God who isn’t,” but I’m no doubt going to be able to deepen what I mean in this word “God.” Will it be more than nothing and less than everything?
