Musings on Ambiguity

“The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He doesn't need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas.” ~ Abe Tannenbaum

The other night Susie shared with me the following passage from a book she was reading called The Power of Premonitions by Dr. Larry Dosser.

“When nineteenth-century Victorians journeyed through the hinterlands of Switzerland as part of their Continental tour, they were often advised to avert their eyes. The disorderly jumble of mountains, they said, was evidence of the Devil’s handiwork and were blasphemous. They were certain that God would never create such chaotic landscapes, a belief they expressed back home in their preference for manicured lawns and geometrically designed gardens. But any backpacker into wilderness knows that healthy forests and mountains are always a lovely mess, with tall, strong trees growing amid fallen, rotting ones, and rock-strewn slopes, valleys, and canyons of immense complexity.

“Respecting chaos and disorder involves a tolerance for ambiguity (ambiguous is derived from Latin words meaning “to drive both ways”). Rejecting ambiguity can narrow people’s lives and lead to intolerance. It can also extinguish premonitions.”

The passage leads me in two directions. First, Dr. Dosser is affirming something I have repeatedly ascribed to, that there is something about life that is always contiguous with the ambiguous, full of uncertain edges, and that wisdom involves learning how to accept the non-explicit and vague. We’re reticent about this, of course, because we simultaneously want everything clearly marked, black and white.

You can see it in my poem Without Fences Or Fears. Or you see it affirmed in quotes like this one from Paul Tillich, who said, “The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.”

And yet, there is a second reaction that rises up within me. I want to be careful not to praise ambiguity too highly because such a stance is has the consequence of promoting a moral relativity that undermines any possibility of moral absolutes. Right and wrong do exist. To argue otherwise is to say that Hitler’s treatment of the Jews was wholly acceptable because “anything goes” in a world where there is no right or wrong.

The same goes for 9/11. There are some who would argue that from the point of view of the terrorists this was the only way to get their voices heard. Heard about what?

Years ago I wrote a series of articles about ethical issues in terminal health care. In my research I learned that in 1980 there was a presidential commission to define what death was, because with all the machines we had developed, the technology was able to keep air flowing, blood pumping, etc. almost indefinitely. The conclusion was, I believe, inconclusive. Yet, they did take a stab at some kind of guidelines that would satisfy lawyers.

The reality is, if we look at a dead body in a field, four days dead, it will certainly be different in most respects from a child flying a kite. Everyone knows what dead is, and what life is. The boundary area, between life and death, is where the confusion lies.

So it is with moral absolutes. We may not have an absolute certainty in all circumstance, because that is the nature of the boundaries. Yet, we don’t throw morality to the wind just because we can’t say with certainty yes or no regarding a situation, an act, or whatever.

My reflection on blackbirds a few years ago was an attempt to apply these thought processes to the notion of God.

Some ambiguity we tolerate, some we embrace and celebrate. And some is due to the fact that we are standing in the shadows and simply need to move a little closer to the light.