The Cut Rate Philosopher

You’d think, of all things, truth ought to make sense. And coherence theory says that it ought to make sense in places other than my own head. Other people are counting on me to not spit things out that they can’t make heads nor tails of. So Coherence theory (and one does’t require a lot of defining here to see what they’re up to) tries to make it so that others can use what I say. Truth is a symbolic expression of something that is expected to reflect reality, but it’s also expected to fit in properly with a complete world view shared by everyone so it’s actually useful to someone other than me. We all look at the world with certain assumptions. For something to be true, it has to contribute to the world view in such a way as to verify it, or at least agree with it. If I were to say that my dog just recited the Gettysburg address, you would very likely say that this couldn’t be true because it doesn’t fit in with any of our current scientific understandings of dogs, recitations or the Gettysburg address. Yes, I know someone out there is going to say, “But your dog might have done that,” but that person is just being argumentative and doesn’t really believe it.

Religious people are very comfortable at this kind of understanding of truth because many religions have been around for a long time and they are pretty complete systems all by themselves. Many account for our existence, the existence of moral good and evil, and provide some reason for the way the world has turned out. Many have creation stories and predictions of how the world will end. Many have theories as to how time works and how people ought to relate to one another. For something to be true, it has to correspond to reality which is, itself, a reflection of this system.

Of course, this can get complicated. For example, our contemporary scientific world view is one of those underlying systems that we might use to evaluate truth. One often hears comments like, “You can’t scientifically prove that God exists.” Yes, but does that mean you can’t prove that God exists, or does it only mean you can’t prove it scientifically? If you subscribe to Coherence theory it may amount to the same thing. If science is the world view that truth must correspond to, then nothing can be considered true unless it contributes, or at least agrees with, scientific method.

Religion suffered a pretty big shock in 1859 when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It argued that all life forms evolve from lower life forms and improve over generations by adapting and passing on positive traits to offspring. It was a powerful theory that explained a great many things without requiring any kind of God and it quickly became the system that statements were expected to agree with in order to be considered true. It still is. And it was such an attractive world view that it even Christian Churches began to change what they thought was true to fit. Today, religions that still believe a personal God created all things in six 24-hour days are considered fringe, even though a substantial number of Christians and a majority of Muslims would call themselves Creationists. The battle over creationism in schools is fierce. Why? Because if truth on all matters are expected to be coherent with an underlying system, accepting evolution as the underlying system changes a lot more than where we came from.

This theory seems to solve the problems associated with Correspondence theory and allows us to say nearly meaningless things like “everyone is entitled to believe what he or she wants.”  This theory argues that truth is constructed by people. Truth is nothing more than what seems obvious when you consider the society from which you come including its historical and cultural context. When you consider the long history of Europe and the spread of Christianity, it seems obvious to anyone that came out of that culture that Jesus was the Son of God and died to forgive sins. This is how they came to consider Christianity to be true. And so it is. When you consider the long history of the Middle East and the spread of Islam, it seems obvious to anyone that came out of that culture that Mohammad was the final prophet and that Jesus was not the Son of God but only one in a long line of prophets of which Mohammad was the last. This is how they came to believe Islam to be true. And so it is. We often see this view expressed when people say things like “That might be true for them, but it’s not true for me.”

This works, as long as no one ever talks to one another or starts making claims on one another. But both of these religions believe that some very real consequences having to do with heaven and hell are riding on their version of the truth. When an eternity in heaven or hell is at issue, it’s not so easy to say that something is true for one person but not another because (and both of these religions have traditionally believed this) on judgment day, something is going to shake out and it can’t be both of these things.

And, once again, saying “That might be true from them, but it’s not true for me,” isn’t usually an attempt at understanding someone else’s point of view. It’s almost always a way of ignoring it.

This theory says that the truth is a symbolic expression. When we say something, we use words or pictures or something of that sort. For something we to be true, we expect it to correspond to something in the real world. If I say it’s raining outside, I am using the words “rain” and “outside” to describe something in the real world. The word “rain” isn’t actual rain itself. It’s a symbol that I use to represent real rain. If you look at the real world, you expect to see that the real things correspond to the symbols I use. In this case, you may go out into the real “outside” and feel the real “rain.” If reality corresponds to what I said, if there is real rain in the real outside, then you can say that what I said is true. If you look at the real world and there is no rain, or it’s not raining in what we agree is “outside” when we first said it but perhaps in some other place, then what I said was not true.

This is probably the most common way of using the word truth, and it seems obvious. But one often hears people say something like this: “Everyone is entitled to believe what they want. This is what I think is true but others might think something differently.”  But because someone believes something, does that make it true? Not if you accept correspondence theory. I may believe that the moon is made of green cheese and, when I die, I will go there in a silver space ship and live out eternity. But if this doesn’t correspond to anything in reality, then it’s not true. Hindus believe there are many Gods. Muslims believe there is only one. Can both these views correspond to something in the real world? If not, then one of these religious ideas, perhaps both, is not true. If they are both true, then you have to be able to explain how two contradictory statements (“There is only one God” and “There are many Gods”) can exist in the real world in which we all live. And then you have to take it a step further and explain how you can live in a world in which seemingly contradictory things can exist.

This isn’t impossible to do, but it is difficult. When you are most inclined to say something like “everyone is entitled to believe what they want,” you are least inclined to go down the tricky and arduous path of explaining this. What you most often mean when you say something like “everyone is entitled to believe what they want,” is “I don’t want to talk about it,” or, worse still, “I don’t care enough of what other people believe to explore whether or not it’s true.”  You are essentially saying something meaningless or perhaps even dismissive. But you are certainly not saying something you are willing to apply to the rest of your life.

Christians say that, at Jesus’ trial, the trial that led to his crucifixion, Pontius Pilate, the man charged with judging him, asks him if he was a King. This was essentially the charge laid against Jesus, so he was asking him for his plea. Is he guilty or not? Jesus’s answer went something like this: ““You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” What Jesus might have meant by this doesn’t seem very clear to us, but it was to Pontius Pilate. He was no fool. He knew the charges against Jesus were trumped up, and he knew that Jesus was no real threat to Rome, which was the only reason it was illegal to call yourself a king. Pilate understood that what Jesus seemed to be saying was this: “That’s not the real question here, is it Pilate? You can call me a king or a prophet or a teacher or even late for supper, but whether I’m a king or not is sort of beside the point. What I’m here to do is to tell people the truth, and a rag man living under a bridge in the Bronx can do that as well as a king. Maybe better.” 

Pilate’s response is very telling. “What is truth?” he says.

We’re not sure if this was meant as a rhetorical question or if Jesus just refused to respond. But, sadly for us, if there was an answer, it wasn’t written down in the Gospel of John, or anywhere else for that matter. And we’ve been trying to figure it out ever since.

But, lately, we haven’t been trying very hard.

Pilate’s question is a very modern one. I imagine that Pilate didn’t know what truth was and I also think he didn’t much care. And neither do we. He was essentially the governor of Judea. To him this was a nasty little outpost that no one really wanted to have much to do with and he was stuck with the very practical job of governing it. He was a bureaucrat. His life was filled with practical details of life like policy, public works, keeping the peace and keeping the books. What is “true” is simply what works best. Later on, a philosopher named William James would call this theory of truth Pragmatism.  A man named Bruce Kuklick wrote the introduction to William James’ book Pragmatism. He summed up James’ theory this was: “He (James) would seek the meaning of ‘true’ by examining how the idea functioned in our lives. A belief was true, he said, if it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world.” To James, and Pontius Pilate, and a great many of us, truth is a relative concept that we judge for ourselves based on the situation we find ourselves in. One thing can be true for one person but not true for another. My truth may not be your truth. Does that sound familiar? James was a bit more subtle than this. He believed that we all had to more or less agree on the truth and that agreement would make our lives better even if truth, in this sense, didn’t correspond to reality. But the modern world is not. You can hear its more crass definition of truth in any college classroom, board room, conference room, break room or in any place where politicians, professors, PR professionals, or modern people of any sort get together to talk. Truth is what I think it is. Saying everyone has his or her own truth is saying the same thing only announcing that, in addition to believing what you want, you are also going to ignore everyone else.

I imagine that, when Jesus used the word “truth,” he meant something that was a universal reality, that you could take to the bank and wouldn’t change value at someone’s whim. The Jewish prophet Zachariah said “These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgments that are true.“

Buddhism has Four Noble Truths, the first one being, “All life is suffering,” something that the rest of Buddhism needs to be true for it to make any sense. The Hindu Vedas tell us to “strive to move away from untruth toward truth,” something impossible to do if truth is a moving target. In the Hadith, Mohammad says, “”Arrogance means ridiculing and rejecting the Truth and despising people.” You can’t reject something that changes all the time. Taoism is a little suspicious of the idea of truth but only because it’s hard to see. Not because it isn’t there.

Lots of philosophers have taken a stab at answering Pontius Pilate’s question. Not surprisingly, there are quite a few different answers.  But all agree that, when you say something is true, you have to mean pretty much the same thing each time you say it. When you use the word “truth” to describe what you heard about the weather or what someone said about the score of a baseball game, you can’t mean something entirely different than when you use the word “truth” to talk about ethics or reason or God.

Plato was a realist, and that has caused us a lot of trouble. Plato believed that, if we were expected to give anything any real thought, it should actually exist. That things actually exist sounds self-evident. Rocks exist. Toads exist. People exist. But Plato also thought that things like beauty and courage exist. And we generally think that too. “What about someone who believes in beautiful things” he wrote, “but doesn’t believe in beauty itself? Don’t you think he is living in a dream?” In other words, to find something, or someone, beautiful, you have to believe there is such a thing as beauty, which is the thing that the beautiful thing or person possesses. And it’s the same for courageous people, intelligent people and good people. They possess courage, intelligence and goodness. Plato thought these things were as real as the people who possessed them. Aristotle made this much more complicated by adding categories in which things existed. He even wrote a book about categories called, to everyone’s surprise, “The Categories.” Everything that exists can be slotted according to an elaborate system of 10 categories. And he was full on board with Plato on realism.

But deep down, there is something sinister going on here because, if these things actually exist – courage, intelligence, goodness – then cowardice, stupidity and evil also exist. And, like courage, intelligence and goodness, people have these things too. Or, at the very least, cowardly, stupid or evil people don’t have the things that would make them courageous, intelligent and good.

Some people think that most of what’s wrong with this world comes from this way of looking at things. They’re called nominalists, and they have a different idea. Here’s the problem with realism, nominalists say:

Aristotle coined a phrase, one we translate “Universal”, to talk about these universal things like beauty and courage. The word he invented translates exactly as “on the whole.” Evil people are, on the whole, evil. They have a certain measure of evilness in them. We talk like this all the time. “You have your father’s Italian temper.” Temper exists in you like it existed in your father and exists in Italian people. And that begs the questions, what do Black people have? Or men? Or women? Or gay people?

Today, and at its most positive, this is called “identity.” But it’s dangerous stuff even when used positively. It could be that it’s most dangerous when it’s used positively. We talk about identity a lot more than we realize. Women are naturally nurturing. Men are naturally competitive. Gay people are born gay.  Black people… (I’m not going there, but lots of people “identify as Black” in a lot of very specific ways.) Some like to think of these as stereotypes, but that word gets applied rather inconsistently by calling negative things “stereotypes” and positive things “identity”.  That’s not very helpful and, if you are going to adopt Aristotle’s categories as we all do, it’s a distinction without a difference. What they really are, are attributes of the Forms that Plato and Aristotle gave us. Lots of times they are pretty harmless. Dwight Yoakam in a cowboy hat is sexier than Dwight Yoakam in a beret. And he’s sexier in a beret than I am, even in a cowboy hat. But here’s the problem. If sexiness exists as a real thing, not only is he sexier than me, but there are lots of other people who are sexier than me, too. They have something I don’t have. And that may well mean they are “better” in other ways too, and therefor more valuable. Why? Because they have membership in arbitrary categories making them worth more time, money, thought and affection. They are not only sexier than me, but superior to me in at least that category. And because we don’t know where to stop, superior to me in other categories, too.

Nominalists think there is a better way. Sexiness is not a thing sexy people have. And courage is not a thing that brave people have. They’re not things at all. Unlike realists, nominalists don’t believe these general categories are real. They’re a kind of symbol for a behavior, collection of behaviors, attributes, qualities, or what-have-you that seem to pop up in groups of people but are stuff that can only really be applied to individuals. Courageous people, and sexy people, certainly exist. I don’t doubt that Dwight Yoakam is sexier than I am. Lots of other people are, too. But that they have something special I don’t have isn’t true, according to nominalists. For example, imagine that there are a bunch of  people on a battlefield, and that they all behave courageously. Imagine they are all men, a relatively common state of affairs on a battlefield. But, if you are a nominalist, you can never say “men are courageous.” What’s more, even if the sample is a billion men and 100% of them are courageous, you  still can’t say it. You can’t even say “men are courageous” if it turns out that 100% of all men are, in fact, courageous. Because men are things and courage is a metaphor for a behavior. The best you can say is “there are 3.75 billion men in the world (including male children) and each individual one acts courageously.” If you think this way, racism  disappears. You can’t say all indigenous people are lazy. You can’t even  say that they tend to be lazy. And you can’t say it, not because it sounds terrible, which is does, or even because it’s not true, which it’s not. You can’t say it because it’s a stupid sentence. Laziness isn’t a thing, so no group can be said to possess it. Individuals can have behaviors that can be described as lazy, but being native can’t be the cause of it because laziness isn’t a thing any group of people can have. It’s not a thing at all, so no group can have it. If you are Aristotle,  laziness is a category like being indigenous is a category. And it’s possible to mix and match categories to your racist heart’s content.

I can’t really say, “Aristotelian philosophers are dorks.” It seems true, but I can’t say it.

Words like “apple” are pretty easy to pin down. You can find something in reality that corresponds to the word and, even if you use it figuratively, you can trace the metaphors or the figures of speech back to an actual apple in one way or the other.  Wittgenstein wouldn’t let you off so easy even with a word like “apple”, but, for most people, not paying attention to Wittgenstein isn’t that hard to do. However, consider a word like “hello.” It’s awfully hard to know what it actually means when you consider it all by itself. You can use it to break the silence when you pick up the phone. You can use it to announce your presence or to get someone’s attention. You can use it to signal your willingness to listen to someone when you meet someone in the hallway. You can use it to indicate you just said something sarcastically (as if just being a dick isn’t making that clear enough). You can use it as a simple greeting to indicate the pleasure you feel at seeing someone. A simple rising or falling of the voice changes it dramatically. So does punctuation. “Hello” doesn’t seem to do much of anything in some situations, but in others in prevents the kind of confused silence that throws even simple relationships into chaos. What would happen if someone picked up the phone and said nothing at all? Someone would eventually say “Hello?”

And yet, for all the ways people use “hello”, some of them even contradictory, we seem to have no trouble understanding the word. Wittgenstein chocks this up to language games – a complicated set of rules, assumptions, experiences and universal clichés that we bring to every word we use. This is more than what we have come to know as “baggage.” When we talk with someone, there is not only a matter of a long history that influences what we say. There is a tacit assumption that the person we are talking to will, or in the case of a lie, will not, understand what we are actually getting at. Let’s say Person A says “You never listen to anything I say.” The usual response that will come from Person B? “Yes I do. Just last Tuesday you asked me to feed the dog and what did I do right away?” This is a complex exchange. Person B answers like Person A is playing the “let’s get down to the facts” game. But person A is really playing the “please pay attention to me” game. All by itself, this is already a recipe for a misunderstanding, but there is a lot more going on in this exchange.

Person A knows he’s using a hyperbole. “You never listen to anything I say.”

Person B knows this too because the hyperbole game is one of the oldest in the book. But she looks to short circuit the attack with an accusation of ingratitude aimed at Person A . “Just last Tuesday…”

Person A knows instantly that Person B is playing the trump card that is allowed by the rules associated with this much more complex game. But how does he know this? Partly because both have played the “You don’t even care enough to try and understand me” game a hundred times before and they both know the rules.

So Person A plays the only card he can in this game and says something like “You know what I mean.” in an attempt to let person B knows she’s as insensitive and uncaring as the original hyperbole suggests.

Wittgenstein gives a partial list of the ways one might use a sentence. Telling a joke, describing an object, explaining an event, praying, making up a story, and the puzzling reporting-the-results-of-an-experiment-using-tables-and-diagrams. His point is that the same words and grammar can be used to say wildly different things. Definitions are not very useful. Knowing the rules everyone is playing by is the much larger part of communication.  Knowing the rules makes it possible to play the game. Tackling your opponent in a football game is expected, and even admired. Doing exactly the same thing while bowling seems a little out of place.

Put language games inside the much larger context of what Wittgenstein calls a “form of life” and you have communication. A form of life is the shared human experience, either in small groups or the one used by all seven billion of us that we bring to a relationship and by which everything we do or say is understood. This makes it possible for us to at least start to understand things  that we, at face value, can’t make either heads or tails of.

This means you can’t use words willy nilly just because you want them to mean something different. In a rare moment of absolute clarity, Wittgenstein writes, “The use of a word needs a justification that everyone understands.” You can’t use the word “beneficial” to describe something that hurts a lot of people.

Sadly, people do this all the time. How do they get away with it? By changing the definition of a word. And “defining” is exactly what we never should have started doing to words in the first place.

Most conversations over coffee become futile when someone in the conversation says “It depends on how you define X.” As a matter of fact, that it seems necessary, from time to time,  to make that statement  indicates that things were already going wrong before either of you stirred the sugar into your coffee. It’s just a matter of time before someone says “I wasn’t technically lying when I said…” or “So what you’re really saying is…” when you both know that no one was really saying anything of the sort. And then someone says, “But you just said…” and someone else says, “That’s not what I meant. I meant…” and it all goes downhill even further.

Why? Because if you have to define words that you’ve been using for the last 20 years, you’ve already lived a life of confusion.

Wittgenstein took aim at something he was already a bit skeptical about. If words are attached to objects, and objects had properties that allow it to be attached to the word, we find ourselves forever looking to generalize definitions to fit the objects we are trying to talk about – even if they don’t really fit. That’s what a definition is. It’s an attempt to describe what all the objects that use that particular word are like. Consider the word “apple.” When we want to identify something as an apple, we look for the characteristics that all apples have in common, which is it’s apple-ness (or something like that). It’s not color. There are red apples and green apples. It’s not shape. Square apples have been developed for easy shipping. It’s not taste. There are sweet and sour apples. The truth is, most of us just use the word apple for the fruits we have been told are apples. Yes, there are scientific rules that define these things but those rules have their own problems when it comes to the meaning of words. Who hasn’t heard someone declare “Tomatoes are technically a fruit” as though no one short of a PhD had encountered this truth before, and we must now re-write our shopping lists accordingly. And, even then, kids are expected to identify apples long before they know the scientific rules. How is that fair? More on language rules in a later posting.

But then we do something really strange. Even if we accept that all apples have at least one characteristic in common, we start using the word “apple” differently anyway. The apple of my eye. Adam’s apple (which seems to have nothing in common with either apples or Adam). Both the French and the Austrians, not always the best of friends, refer to potatoes as “apples of the earth.”  But, you say, these are metaphors. Yes, but now we have to decide when someone is using a metaphor by (are you ready?) defining “metaphor” which was our problem to start with. And the French and Austrians are just fine with their non-metaphorical potatoes and the unscientific relationship between the apples they get from trees and the ones they get from the earth.

Now consider words like “love” or “equality” or “justice” or “friendship” or “hatred” or “stupidity.” I’ll bet you’ve had a conversation or two about those ideas that never got past the definition stage.

So what do we do? Wittgenstein says that, instead of looking for attributes for objects that you can generalize into a definition, look at how it’s used and, more importantly, who it’s being used by. Maybe a definition isn’t the best way to determine what a word means. Maybe something that might be referred to as a family resemblance might work better.

Object 1 has properties A,B and C
Object 2 has properties B,C, and D
Object 3 has properties C,D and E
Object 4 has properties D,E and F

Object 4, all by itself, has nothing in common with Object 1. But could it be that it’s relationship with Objects 2 and 3 might just give us a better insight into what Object 4 actually is and might knowing about Object 1, and its relationship with 2 and 3, help us understand what Object 4 means? The point is, there may be no central core to a word in which the meaning is located. Quite the opposite. It’s what’s happening outside the word that gives it meaning.

Now plug in the more complex words just mentioned and suddenly a conversation hung up on the definition of “love” just might be jostled free if you are willing to include the word “stupidity” in the conversation.

Now here’s the really interesting part. According to Wittgenstein, we all do this already. We bring all these relationships among words and ideas with us into a conversation. But we are frozen-terrified to let anyone know what they are. Some of that comes from being embarrassed about these relationships and some of it comes from not knowing them very well ourselves. He calls this mess of rules, grammars and meanings “language games”. Knowing who is playing what game is the secret to communication.  And being a bit more open about the secret rules  you’re playing by is what turns you from a incomprehensible boor into a friend.

Wittgenstein tried to build a system in which everyone could communicate and in which no one could possibly be misunderstood. By his own admission, he didn’t do a very good job. At least not on the first go around. The idea is pretty much there, and he does improve on it a little later but, right out of the gate, it’s mindbendingly difficult to follow. He starts with the idea that the state of the world is made up of facts, not objects. This matters because objects are simple and most of us don’t see past the objects in the world. Because we only see the objects in the world, we think everything is simple and everyone else should be able to identify the things I am talking about as easily as I can. Even a dullard should be able to figure them out. That’s why, when someone says “pass the ketchup” one doesn’t expect the mustard. Mustard and ketchup, as objects, are easy enough to distinguish. But, says Wittgenstein, the world isn’t made up of objects like we have always believed. The world is made up of facts which are the state of affairs that happens when objects combine themselves in complex and (this is important) logical ways. A way is logical when the properties of the object combine with the properties of other objects to produce a state of affairs that is in keeping with the properties of that object. What’s important is not so much what ketchup “is” but that it arrive at your end of the table and ends up on your French-fries.  The ketchup doesn’t matter. It’s the state of affairs that the ketchup participates in. When this happens, it becomes what they call an existent state of affairs and those existent states of affairs all combine to make up the world. Of course, you could still end up with mustard because mustard is an object that has enough properties in common with ketchup to still create a state of affairs that’s logical. This would be called a possible state of affairs. What isn’t possible or existent are states of affairs that are in inherently illogical combinations – for example, asking for the ketchup and getting world peace instead. That is not logical and so it is not possible. So we end up with three possible states of affairs. Ones that exist, one’s that are possible, and ones that are illogical which, really, are not states of affairs at all The world as we know it is made up of states of affairs that exist and only those that exist. No more and no less.

But how do you talk about these state of affairs? When you ask for the ketchup, what you are really doing is generating a thought that is a picture of the logical connections among the objects in the state of affairs, or what you hope the state of affairs to become – good friends having French-fries with ketchup for everyone. And for that to exist (and so become part of the real world), everyone involved has to have roughly the same picture in their heads. Language does this. If you can construct a sentence that can combine the objects (ketchup, friends, french-fries) logically then it is said to have meaning and you have a pretty good chance of getting ketchup on your fries. If your sentence includes elements that have no meaning then they cannot make up a legitimate thought. Those can’t be used to generate a useful picture and no one will know what the hell you are talking about. Asking for world peace when the objects available to you are ketchup, french-fries and friends is what Wittgenstein would call nonsense. Some sentences are obviously nonsense like “my cat is similar.” Others seem like they should make sense but don’t because the properties of the objects can’t go together logically to make a picture. “There are 12 inches in an hour.” And there are sentences that can create a picture easily enough but the picture isn’t the same from one person in the conversation to the next.  “Last night was awesome.”

You can see where things could go wrong.

But Wittgenstein made some mistakes, some of which he was aware of and tried to straighten out pretty quickly. Others he noticed later and either tried to fix later in his life or simply tossed out the window depending on which interpretation of the rest of his wacky life you want to accept.

The first is that there seems to be some statements that are not nonsense but can’t really be talked about either, and if Wittgenstein was clear on anything it was this: If you can’t talk about it, you shouldn’t talk about it. If I say “my cat is similar,” it is clearly nonsense. If I say “our cats are similar,” it seems to make sense. But talking about it is futile because you can never generate a meaningful picture of “similarity” by talking about the objects. You need to show it. Wittgenstein accepted this exception.

But there are some things that are important, don’t seem to be nonsensical, still seem to be a part of the real world, but can’t be talked about according to Wittgenstein’s system.  You can’t talk about love, for example. And sometimes you sort of have to. If you tell your significant other, “I love you,” you are already on thin ice because the picture in your head is very likely not the same as the the one in the head of your significant other. If you say “I love you as a friend,” you are in a Wittgenstein-ian world of hurt because no one understands what that means. Still, it seems like the sort of thing that should be talked about.

The other thing is that, using Wittgenstein’s understanding of language, you can only talk about things the properties of which are known (and agreed upon) enough to have thoughts. And these thoughts have to be  meaningful enough to generate pictures everyone can agree on. According to Wittgenstein, you can’t say “I like unicorns” because that can never describe a state of affairs that exists (because there are no unicorns). They are not part of the world  as Wittgenstein sees it because , if you remember, the world is only made up of states of affairs that exist. Even if you can get by with never talking about unicorns, you will have a bit of trouble if you were to substitute the word “God” for “unicorns.” Everyone can agree that unicorns don’t exist. Not so with God. And, really, talking about God is pretty inevitable. Even saying “I love you” is a problem because… well, you can work that one backwards on your own.

And one other problem: Wittgenstein says that our language defines the limits of our world. That’s a problem already for people who binge watch Netflix and have ended up with a limited grasp of language.  But it’s also a logical problem. If you have a limit, it must imply the existence of something outside the limit. The speed limit is 70 mph because someone went to 71 and said, “Woah! That is way too fast.” The speed limit isn’t 70 because 71 doesn’t exist. So Wittgenstein’s insistence that nothing exists outside the limits of language is a contradiction if only because of the word “limit.”

Wittgenstein published  only one book in his life, a short piece of about 70 pages. The rest of his life he spent bouncing around working as a gardener, an architect, an officer on the front lines in WW1, an elementary school teacher (take a wild guess at how well that worked out), and a hospital porter in WW2. Somewhere in there, he seemed to have realized that he got something wrong and started writing another book in which he rethought the “picture” idea and instead started talking about language “games.” More on that soon.

The question “who am I?” sounds so enormously self-centered that it’s easy to dismiss it as one of those philosophical inquires that’s either so obtuse as to be meaningless or so egotistical as to be dangerous. Ethics, on the other hand, is very popular – so popular that most people don’t think you need philosophy to do it. You just need to be good, and getting good doesn’t take too long. You were probably good to start with, so all you have to do is forgive yourself for the few mistakes you have made (after all, everybody makes those) and you’re set to go. Then you can make up whatever you like and still give the impression you care about other people. It’s still entirely self-centered but it’s harder to see that that’s what’s going on. Answering the question “who am I?”  isn’t very popular at all. It sounds just too self-centered right out of the gate. That’s too bad, because it’s no good deciding how you should treat other people if you don’t know some very basic things about yourself. Are you even capable of treating other people well? Why would you want to? If you do, what makes you think you can keep it up? Can you even trust your own understanding of these things? Anyone who hears someone tell them, “I did what I thought was right,” is almost always on the bad end of someone who didn’t think these things through very well. They are simply trying to cover up for a mistake, and the mistake they are covering up for isn’t an ethical mistake. It was a mistake having to do with their own understanding of who they are. And they probably have it wrong.

So let’s start from the very beginning. When we talk about ourselves, we can group our understandings into a two basic categories. One set consists of statements like, “I used to be 2 years old but my body changed and now I am 25 and different in many ways.” and “I remember going fishing with my father once. I may forget that but I will probably remember other things I have done with my father.” These kinds of propositions are pretty hard to argue with and, even though they may take some explaining, we still get the sense that they can be explained. The sciences have taken a pretty good run at explaining these sorts of things. Bodies change due to cell regeneration or deterioration. Memories fade because neural networks don’t function properly, It’s true they raise all kinds of philosophical questions too, but you can avoid the philosophy if you have a solid faith in science.

But there is another way of looking at ourselves that’s a bit harder to deal with. “When I die, my body is left behind and my real self lives on in heaven or hell depending on how I have lived my life.”  You may not agree with this sort of thinking, but you also get the sense that people can say them without being entirely crazy. For example, if someone said, “I am a bowl of Cheerios,” you would not think of them the same way as you would of someone who said, “I was created by God to participate in His plans for humanity here on earth.” And it may not be because you think one is right and the other wrong. You just know that there are legitimate ways of answering the question “who am I?” even if you disagree. And they don’t include declaring yourself to be a breakfast cereal.

If you want to jettison all this because it sounds too religious for you, and it’s beneath you to take religion seriously, then let’s make it even simpler. “I am a good person,” and “I have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” are very similar statements. Science can’t even take a shot at these, but you still get the feeling they are making claims on who you are and it’s important to decide whether or not they are true.

That’s because how you answer the question “who am I?” decides a lot about what you might be responsible for, how other people might make decisions about such thing as whether or not you can be trusted or how reliable you might be when it comes to doing the right thing. Doing ethics isn’t much help if the guy doing them thinks he is a good person and can do no wrong. The cart ends up coming before the horse in a very big way.

Substance Dualism

One of the most common ways of answering the question “who am I?” was put on the table by Rene Descartes. He argued that we are made up of two very simple, very divisible, very identifiable parts – the body and the mind. For our purposes, you can put “spirit” or “soul” in place of mind. Some philosophers and theologian will scoff, but let’s not make it too complicated. This theory – substance dualism – argues that these are distinct entities that don’t talk much to each other. When someone at a funeral says, “this is just the shell. The real person isn’t there anymore.” they are talking like a substance dualist. The thing called the “self” is gone and, even though the part that most of us would recognize as the real person is still very much there, the actual “real” person has left it behind and is presumably no worse off for the separation. Terms like “soul mate” need substance dualism to mean anything. So do common expressions like “He (or she) is beautiful on the inside.” They both imply that something substantial different from the body can account for that person’s real “self.”

Descartes arrived at this idea by asking himself, “what can I not possible be without and still say I existed?” He decided he could doubt most anything including the existence of his own body. Why? Because he relies entirely on his senses to discern his body, and his eyes have deceived him before. So what’s left? Well, he said, if I doubt everything, the only thing I can’t doubt is that I’m doubting. So the only thing I can’t deny the existence of is my mind. I can’t doubt my own mind because I need my mind to doubt it.

Aristotle’s approach was different, but he still came out in the same place – substance dualism. He said that the soul is a “simple” thing. It can’t be divided, and it can’t change. Clearly, the body changes and can easily be divided, even destroyed. But the soul can’t be destroyed and so it must be substantially different from the body. Then he reasoned out that, if the soul never changes, it must have pre-existed in a special place long before you were born. For a lot of people, that put him in the “I’m a bowl of Cheerios,” category, so it’s best that we don’t go there.

The problem here is that you can’t have much respect for people if their body is nothing more than a constantly changing, corrupted vessel that has no real value. So substance dualism seems to leave a lot of practical problems unresolved even if it works well at funerals.

Property Dualism

Property dualism tries to solve this by recognizing that it’s hard for us to imagine that there is no real connection between our minds and our bodies. They seem to work so well together that there must be some way in which they are talking to each other. And to simply dismiss the body as not mattering very much just seems wrong given that we spend an enormous amount of time paying attention to it. Still, they do seem like very distinct entities. I can think just as clearly even if I lose a limb.

Another matter that property dualists seem to have taken note of: most of our reactions to physical stimulus are remarkably similar. When I poke you with a sharp stick, your reaction is awfully close to the reaction I get from everybody else when I poke them with sharp sticks.

But not completely the same. The thing that I can’t be sure of is exactly what you are feeling when I poke you with a sharp stick. And even if I can make the connection between sharp stick poking and pain, I have no idea if the pain you feel is anything like the pain I feel. Remember those pain charts on doctors’ walls with the round face that starts with a smile and ends with tears? What does that mean, anyway? There must be a connection between the pain and the poking but how do I know it’s not different for each person?

The property dualist says that there may not be a real distinction between the body and the mind but they certainly behave differently. They have different properties even if they are substantially the same. So they divide things up into, not objects, but properties. When I am talking about the body, I talk about size and color, for example. When I talk about the mind, I talk about kindness and cleverness. I can still address you like your mind and body are one in the same, but I talk about the properties unique to mind-things and body-things like they are different, which they are.

Why does this matter? Because it makes it possible to deal with you as a whole human being rather than as a divided creature. The problem, though, is that it still doesn’t give me any insight into whether or not the mind-things look the same to you as they do to me. I can say you are kind, but I still don’t know what that means to you.

Reductionism

Reductionists, like Thomas Hobbs, believe something of the opposite of Descartes. It’s true that we ought to reduce ourselves to the most basic level in order to answer the question, “what is the very least I could have and still be me?” But instead of arriving at the mind, he arrives at the body. It’s the only thing our senses are capable of grasping. True, our senses can deceive us, but they don’t deceive us all the time and, of all the things we see, feel, smell, taste and hear, we see, feel, smell, taste and hear our bodies the most. So doubting its existence just seems silly. Our mind, on the other hand, seems pretty nebulous and anything like a soul seems ridiculous to Thomas Hobbs. So if we have to doubt something, we should doubt the invisible and undefinable mind. To him there is no reason to believe such a thing exists. But science has proven that synapses firing and hormones pumping can explain just about any human behavior that you can think of. All it takes is someone to ask a question like, “why do people fall in love?” and a dozen scientists will show up with brain scans and endorphin numbers to explain it all without once mentioning the metaphorical heart or the moving of the spirit.

The problem with reductionism is exactly that, though. If you can explain that everything that makes us human are these physical things, then we start looking suspiciously like chickens who also have firing synapses and pumping hormones. Are humans not special in any way? Are we nothing more than highly evolved animals. Lot’s of people say this, but, before you agree, remember that you may have to put aside things like human rights and respect for the dignity and life of others. Or you will have to apply the same rights to the chicken you had for dinner as you do to people, in which case you shouldn’t have had chicken for dinner.

The modern solution to this is not very satisfying but it’s very popular. Materialism is the scientific version of Reductionism. It says, yes, there is a mental state that we have to explain in addition to simply physical reactions. When you poke someone with a sharp stick, he or she not only react by pulling away from the stick, but that person feels pain and he or she gets upset. What are these two things (pain and anguish)? They have no physical existence? The Materialist says they are nothing more than a mental state defined by the physical events. The mental state isn’t something different. It’s just the expression of the relationship between physical components like sharp sticks and soft flesh. But even if this is a good model under which to practice things like medicine and kick boxing, it doesn’t explain mental states that have no physical components and it doesn’t explain why we react differently to events that do have a physical component. For example, I might hear a piece of music that I think is lovely and you think is terrible. There is no physical stimulus but we end up with two very different mental states. True, you can say that I am getting more endorphins than you, but why? Even when there is a physical component, materialism doesn’t explain why people react differently to the same component. One person’s pain makes him run away and another’s makes him punch someone in the nose. Why?

So it seems that any kind of clear separation between the mind and the body doesn’t give us enough to go on when it comes to explaining who I am, how and why I react to certain stimuli in certain ways, how I can predict how you will react, and how we both can expect the other to behave in order to end up with the best outcome. So several more complicated theories have been put on the table.

Logical Behaviorism is a theory that tries to explain what happens when two people are poked with sharp sticks and seem to behave differently. It also tries to help me interpret these things so I can respond to people as though they were real people, that is, with compassion, even if I don’t think they have something like a soul. And thinking people have a soul doesn’t seem to be enough to stop people from hurting each other anyway. So we have to find something else to solve this problem.

Logical Behaviorists believe that, when I poke you with a sharp stick, and you react with anger, tears or wincing, you are responding in such a way as to advertise a disposition that others who have been poked with sharp sticks can instantly recognize. What matters is not the actual feeling as much as the behavior. You can never know what another is feeling when the sharp stick is introduced, and you certainly can’t know why this matters so much, but you can try to understand others by looking at their behavior and making a connection between their behavior, your behavior and what they must be thinking.

This seems to do it, doesn’t it? The self is the thing that reacts to outside stimulus, results in close, common, but not identical reactions. These reactions help us better understand what people are experiencing and, hopefully, help us to be more thoughtful and compassionate. Except….

how close does the behavior have to be, and does it work with less obvious mental states like joy or love or just with obvious ones like the outcome of being poked with a sharp stick? Even more problematic, what if I keep deeply personal feelings to myself? According to behaviorists, these feelings would not exist if I didn’t act on them.

There are other theories that try to explain who I am. They try to account for things like memory, for example – how they seem to change, disappear, or get replaced but can still belong to the same person. But they all fall short in addressing the big problem of the self. Since I so obviously change in body, mind, memory, intentions, reactions and just about everything that I might normally use to explain who I am, how can I actually claim to be the same person from one year to the next? And it does no good to say that my soul doesn’t change because exactly what is the soul? Do you really want to go back to Aristotle who says that, if it never changes, it must have always existed?

There is one philosophy that says that we’ve had it wrong all along. They say, we started with no “self” at all, and a good hard look at the world will convince us that there’s no use getting a soul from God because he probably doesn’t exist and, even if he does, you can’t trust a guy that makes such a mess of the world to make anything good out of you. It’s called existentialism.

Lynne Lori and I came back just a few days ago from a road trip. We drove down to Utah, and on the way we arranged for the release of our son’s body , from the state examiners’ office, the body of Sarah, Ben and Matthew’s brother, and we arranged his cremation. On Wednesday night we visited with him for a little, we in our travel-worn wrinkled clothes and he in his cardboard box. And then we watched as they slipped him into that great steel vault. Three hours later he was returned to the dust God made all of us from. Then we drove another 5 hours south to settle him into the back seat of his truck and drive him home. We did this ourselves because that’s what we taught our children to do. Do your own work. Don’t make anyone else do it. Pay your bills. Take care of your responsibilities. Take care of your people. So that’s what we did. We took care of him as best we could just like he had taken care of his people in his time.

When Jonathan was in Afghanistan, I wrote to him every week. After a mission outside the wire we would try and meet online for a little while. He wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing. He asked me once what God might think of him when it came his time to explain himself. This is what I wrote to him. I know this because I have read the letter again just the other day after it made its way halfway around the world to Forward Operating Base Warrior and the back again.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you how you’re doing but I can never really find a way to ask. Your life must seem like such a small gear clicking away inside such a big machine. Most people don’t ever get that experience. My job seems to have some connection with what the machine stamps out. People pay their tuition, take the courses, graduate, and go on with life. My job is in step two and I try to do it as best I can. But the outcome is still pretty predictable. What difference does it make if I’m successful at doing what I do or not? Step three and four happen no matter what I do. Even I think, some days, I make a difference but it’s not really true. But the whole world is watching what you’re doing and wondering what’s going to happen because of it. You can’t see what the end is going to be like, if there ever is an end to this. I suppose you wonder, sometimes, if your country really cares what you’re doing and, sad to say, I imagine lots of people don’t. Most don’t disagree. Most just don’t think about it. It’s easy to forget, isn’t it? Sometimes someone will ask what my kids are doing. Going to school or working at the library or living in Duluth are all pretty easy to talk about. Then I get to you and there’s always a bit of a pause where they try to figure out what to say. They simply haven’t considered what that all might mean and the conversation turns cliché. I, for one, care about what you’re doing. And it doesn’t have much to do with this particular war. It has to do with how the world deals with people who, for one reason or another, can’t take care of themselves. I don’t have a good opinion of what most people want to take out of this world because it seems as though, most of the time, everyone wants to take as much as they can, and they have to take it from someone. Some country has to stand up and say that they’ll always have a few people brave enough to stand in the way of the strong beating on the weak. There are always a few people who will do the right thing. It makes the rich think twice about stealing from the poor.

Do you think you did the right thing? I don’t know. But you’re doing a good thing. If not for you, for some poor starving sod who, right now, would be getting the last nickel squeezed out of him if there wasn’t a nation who made a promise to the world to stop that kind of thing from happening. “

I don’t know if I would write that again but I know I would tell Jonathan that he is doing the right thing. That he has more often done the right thing than not. To do his own work and don’t make anyone else do it. To take care of his responsibilities and his people.

He used to wear a keffiyeh around his neck. I asked him once where he got it and he wouldn’t say for a long time. I said I liked it. It looked good on him. He said I could have it when he was dead and he laughed. Lynne and I pieced the story together in the car last week. He was on patrol, I think in Kabul. A bomb went off and he rushed a shop owner near him and knocked he and his children to the ground as the pieces of the bomb and the bomber when flying across the marketplace. The shop owner tried to give him a goat, not something that can be easily carted around and not easily adapted to the lifestyle of the airborne infantry. So he took a keffiyeh from the pieces of the shopkeepers stall all scattered around the on the ground. I have it now because he’s dead and he said I could. And I’m a little ashamed. I have never done such a thing as the thing he did to earn it. I never could. I won’t ever wear it and neither will he. And this world will never know about the thousand things he and others have done to make something good out of what someone else has tried his best to ruin.

This world can be a cruel place – to everyone at least some of the time and to a few poor souls just about all the time. But it’s not the only world. The Algonquin say that, at night in the forest, the souls of men hunt the souls of animals.  The great Tao moves through the universe smoothing what we have made rough and softening what we have hardened so it will become, once again, the world God intended it to be. Jesus says that in his father’s house there are a great many places to live out our eternity and he is going to prepare a place for us. I have been told by people much smarter than me that to believe there is a life after this one is the dream of a child. But could it really be that the terrible and the wonderful things that you can conceive of in your heart and in your mind, and could it be that the powerful and touching things you can do with your hands – could it be that they all simply disappear one day as if we had been nothing more than stones in a field waiting to be worn down by the wind? I can’t believe it. If it’s a child’s dream to think that these things we do and say – if it’s a child’s dream to think that the way we love our people and the way we touch one another goes on someplace forever then it’s little more than a statement of despair to say they don’t.

Ezekiel sees a great field of dry bones – men long dead and long forgotten – and he prophesies to them. And when he does there is a great rattling sound as the bones come together. And then he prophesies to the winds and the winds blow and God breathes life into the dead and they stand up – a great army.  How many of those in this great army do you know. One? A hundred? Half as many as you could and of those you know you know them half as well as you could. Because we no longer have the time. We no longer have the heart. We no longer have the strength to bother with them. We don’t do our own work. We make others do it. And we don’t take care of our people because we are too afraid of what it might cost. We are cowards and we need to stop living like this. Were we still in the garden that God had put us in however long ago it would be different. But we have made of this world a pit in which the rich steal from on the poor and the powerful beat on the weak. You don’t need to be part of this sham of a world. You can think on others. You can be part of the world where my son waits for us – one of a great army with the breath of God breathed into them – He waits there – one eyebrow up with his goofy smile. “What took you so long?” he’ll say. “I wanted to come sooner but they wouldn’t let me. I wanted to come when you left but they wouldn’t let me. Am I too late, Jonathan? Do you still remember me?”  “Yes, I remember you. And, no, you’re not too late.”

Is it the dream of a child? I suppose it is. But up against the wisdom of great men, up against the powerful who, with the stroke of a pen grind the weak to dust… how foolish are we to believe it? How often are the dreams of children wrong? Hardly ever, I think. In my father’s house there are places for us all to have a little peace. If it weren’t true, say’s Jesus, I wouldn’t have told you.