Circumventing the logic and limits of representation: Otherness in East-West approaches to paradox

Abstract

This chapter argues that paradox arises, not from our phenomenal experience, but from our efforts at conceptualizing it through the logic of comprehension dominating Western thought. It identifies an Aristotelian-inspired “Being” ontology and a corresponding representationalist epistemology as the primary underlying cause of paradox in truth claims made on empirical observations. Drawing on a Heraclitean-inspired tradition in the West, this chapter shows how paradox may be circumnavigated through an alternative logic of Otherness. Underlying this metaphysical outlook is an ontology of Becoming, which takes flux and change as pervasive and inexorable. Language and logic are thus seen as futile attempts to fix the unfixable. Embracing a Becoming world view of reality enables us to recognize the limits of logic and representation and hence develop more nuanced and oblique modes of communication and responses. A Becoming world view sensitizes us to a necessary Otherness always already immanent in representational truth claims.