SOURCE: Culler, Jonathan. “Paradox and the Language of Morals in La Rochefoucauld.” Modern Language Review 68, no. 1 (January 1973): 28-39.

In the essay below, Culler maintains that La Rochefoucauld's use of paradoxical language in exploring ethics forces readers to unravel the complex moral categories they use, and make sense of their own moral experience.

For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity, & c. And therefore such names can never be the true grounds of any ratiocination.¹

‘Le paradoxisme’, writes Fontanier,

est un artifice de langage par lequel des idées et des mots, ordinairement opposés et contradictoires entre eux, se trouvent rapprochés et combinés de manière que, tout en semblant se combattre et s'exclure réciproquement, ils frappent l'intelligence par le plus étonnant accord, et produisent le sens...