I think, objectively, that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things. I think, subjectively, there is no right or wrong way to do things. I'm told that subjectivity and objectivity are constantly dancing awkwardly in the content of truth, but that both are necessary. I'm told that they live in tension and that tension is good. Somehow there is a paradoxical relationship between the two that makes truth impossible to define with objectivity or subjectivity alone. I don't know what that means. I am also told that meaning informs truth as well, and that meaning is relationship. I don't have a relationship with the locally accepted definition of truth that surrounds me. That's strange, and I'm not sure I fully understand it. I hate jargon. A concrete example (I'm told that Jesus is the best example, typically): If there is a chair sitting in a room that no one has ever seen or knows about, that may be an objective fact, but until someone possesses subjective knowledge of that fact it isn't true--it isn't part of reality. Bizarre.
I "annihilated" myself yesterday in a discussion that flitted back and forth between subjectivity and objectivity. I "contradicted" myself so severely that I reduced myself to nothing in the perception of my peers. It was disheartening to fall off of the invisible tightrope suspended above the object-subject nebula. I can't really remember why I fell off, I think I was pushed. I contradict myself quite often. Somehow I thought this would have been appreciated in an environment that preaches paradox as much as this one does. Something pedantic is going on, I'm sure of it. Situationally, contextually, objectively there is a right way and a wrong way to go about the preservation of Place. Universally, totally, objectively, there is no right or wrong way to go about the preservation of a Place.
There must be something really comfortable about living in the indiscernible cloud of "tension." I realize that in modern society there is an almost unbearable attention to scale and degree. The "intelligent" thing to do is to be a compatibilist and say that scale and degree are both imminently important and unimportant, simultaneously. This is an apparent logical contradiction, but proponents of the idea would call it paradoxically true, and Christians would call Jesus' affinity for such paradoxes to their aid ("The first shall be last and the last shall be first," et cetera.) Christ's paradoxes were markedly different, however, because they didn't function as an end within themselves. The aforementioned paradox, for example did not literally refer to someone circularly moving from the head of the table to the end in never ending iterations, but spoke to those who lived their lives in humility and how their place in eternity would be one of glory. There is no such resolution for many apologetically induced paradoxes. There is comfort in these irresolute positions because, while they are difficult to argue positively for, they are relatively easy to defend negatively with talk of mystery and faith and trinitarian ideas. In other words, it is difficult for someone to argue against such positions positively.
It's hard to relate these paradoxes to pragmatism in any way, since their components are fundamentally indiscernible from one another. There is no provision for degree or scale, only vague "tension." Which relates to me in terms even more vague. Therefore, most of the meaning is lost.
