Oppenheimer

The acceptance of antinomy as a basis of life, both with oneself and with others.

I am looking forward to viewing the film, “Oppenheimer” next week.  He has always been one of my heroes. I just read some parts of his book, Science and the Common Understanding, not as preparation as much as a way of recollecting what I found many years ago attractive about his thought and brave action. 

One theme of his thought is captured by a word he uses often--antinomy (“a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable” Microsoft Word).   

He fears our temptations to universal knowledge, “an illusion fostered by the monistic view of the world in which a few great central truths determine in all its wonderful and amazing proliferation everything else that is true.”

Instead he insists,

          “And so it is with man's life. He may be any of a number of things; he will not be all of them. He may be well versed, he may be a poet, he may be a creator in one, or more than one science; he will not be all kinds of man or all kinds of scientists; And he will be lucky if he has a bit of familiarity outside the room in which he works….”

“So it is with the great antinomies that through the ages have organized and yet disunited human experience; the antinomy between the ceaseless change and the wonderful novelty and the perishing of all earthly things, and the eternity which inheres in every happening; in the antinomy between growth and order, between the spontaneous and changing and irregular and the symmetrical and balanced; in the related antinomy between freedom and necessity; between action, the life of the will, and observation and analysis and the life of reason; between the question “How?” and the questions “Why?” and “to what end?”; between the causes that derive from natural law, from unvarying regularities in the natural world, and those other causes that express purposes and define goals and ends.”

Out of this variousness of hope, spirit and purpose, we all fashion our own meanings and are respectful of the lives and dreams of others. 

Integrity is not a “complete the sentence” game.  It is only the certainty of antinomy: the holding to a truth that is neither final nor absolute but a way of perceiving a particular trust, within an ever-changing life of experience.

In this way, and perhaps in this way alone, we can meet “the other” in the midst of battle, and find not an enemy, but recognize an ally and a friend.