Values and Contradiction

What is good, [Nicolai] Hartmann tells us, necessarily lies in a large number of incompatible directions, and it is intrinsically impossible that all of these should be followed out into realization. One cannot, for example, achieve pure simplicity and variegated richness in the same thing or occasion, and yet both incontestably make claims upon us, and ought both to be realized. The realm of values, in fact, always imposes a logically impossible task upon us: we are to achieve each and all of a large number of things which yet cannot all be achieved together…What is self-contradictory certainly makes no sense in theory: there are no states of affairs that can ever make it true.  But, contrary to what is generally thought, what is self-contradictory makes sense in practice: we are in fact obliged to strive towards value accommodations to which full reality can never be given.  Even Kant saw this when he held that only in eternity could we conform to the demands of the categorical imperative (Axiological Ethics, p. 73).