Why drive on the right side of the road? The left works for the Brits. Why start question-words with wh- instead of k-, as does Sanskrit, Farsi, and certain dialects of Ancient Greek? Why read left to right? We could go right-to-left, like Hebrew and Arabic, or even top-to-bottom as is sometimes done with Chinese. Why is i the square root of -1, when (-i)² also equals -1? Why does a clock go clockwise, when making it go anti-clockwise would work just as well?
All of these choices are purely arbitrary. The alternatives would have worked equally well. But refusing to choose one between equivalent choices would have left confusion; it would have erased the possibility of meaning and cohesion.
Meaning starts from the meaningless; from de-cision, that is, cutting something away.
The paradox of “Buridan’s ass” is about a donkey that is faced with two equal succulent bales of hay, both the same distance away. Does the donkey starve since there is no reason to choose one bale over the other? Al-Ghazali similarly writes,
Suppose two similar dates in front of a man, who has a strong desire for them but who is unable to take them both. Surely he will take one of them, through a quality in him, the nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things.
So the rational rests on the irrational; because without this symmetry-breaking, nothing happens.
Du Temps Trouvé 