Dialectic in Writing

David Jauss has an article in the current Writer's Chronicle that's worth a read. The article is called "Lever of Transcendence: Contradiction and the Physics of Creativity."

Jauss states that creativity is the product of divergent thinking, that uncertainty results from divergent thinking, that contradiction is at the heart of uncertainty. Making use of a metaphor from Simon Weil, Jauss says that "contradiction can function as the lever of transcendence in the creative process."

Jauss cites Niels Bohr: "There are the trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."

Jauss says, "Clearly, writers have--as Samuel Beckett has said--'a strong weakness for oxymoron.'"

Jauss quotes Cleanth Brooks: "the language of poetry is the language of paradox."

Jauss says, "Robert Lowell is another poet who often found his poems by resisting his initial, convergent impulses. According to Jonathan Raben, Lowell's 'favorite method of revision was simply to introduce a negative into a line, which absolutely reversed its meaning."

Jauss says if we would use creativity to "lift the world" we should "learn to argue with ourselves, to think dialectically, to look, like Janus in opposite directions at the same time."

My summary through quotes is of course insufficient, but you get the idea.