In praise of … inconsistency

This piece picks up on the theme of my earlier post, ‘Of light and shadow’.

"Who wants to be consistent?”, asks Oscar Wilde. “The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I." Nor I. 

Those who allow themselves to be seduced by a procrustean desire to explain away inconvenient truths, to resolve every vital conflict in a spurious “higher unity”, or to render every paradox a platitude - the monomaniac, the reductionist, the system builder - can only ever realize a distorted and diminished view of the world, and however brilliant, elegant or persuasive their own peculiar species of blindness and folly, they can never wholly escape the taint of hubris, shallowness and self-delusion. This is why all truly great thinkers and artists are inconsistent. They are complex beings, within whom powerful opposing forces - good and evil, passion and reason, romantic and classic - are constantly striving for, but never quite attaining, supremacy. And they know that the price of consistency is intellectual dishonesty.

“All true opinions are living”, Ruskin tells us, “and show their life by being capable of nourishment, therefore of change.” But those obsessed with consistency - whether in thought or art or life - always assume a single unchanging truth, valid for all men at all times, and to deviate from which must be fatal. Isaiah Berlin describes this mindset, and its consequences, with admirable clarity:

The notion that there must exist final objective answers to normative questions, truths that can be demonstrated or directly intuited, that it is in principle possible to discover a harmonious pattern in which all values are reconciled, and that it is towards this unique goal that we must make; that we can uncover some single central principle that shapes this vision, a principle which, once found, will govern our lives – this ancient and almost universal belief, on which so much traditional thought and action and philosophical doctrine rests, seems to me invalid, and at times to have led (and still to lead) to absurdities in theory and barbarous consequences in practice.

But the inconsistency I speak of here shouldn’t be confused with mere incoherence or woolly-mindedness. Ideas and values should always be explored fully and rigorously, and pursued - in theory, at least - to their logical conclusions, for it is only in this way that they can reveal to us the aporia - the moral, intellectual or artistic impasse - that defines and limits their peculiar relation to the real world, and which is the seal of their authenticity. “I never met with a question yet, of any importance“, Ruskin declares, “which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer … For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself  at least three times”. 

Nor should it be confused with mere relativism, or taken to imply any kind of panegyric to the idea of progress.  There are shallow and superficial ideas as well as profound ones, and no truly great ideas are ever wholly superseded: the insightful exercise of what Burke called the “moral imagination”, or what Coleridge termed the “suspension of disbelief”, is all that we require to retrieve them from obscurity, as from Ariosto’s valley of lost things, and restore them to their former vigour and beauty.