“Miracles are explainable; it is the explanations that are miraculous.”
— Tim Robinson
Ineffable: a word for the unexplainable sacred, the glorious unspeakable, the venerated bits of life we cannot vocalize. My thesis: all experience is ineffable, and therefore the only honest response to existence is silence. But what kind of silence?
The word ineffable prompts images of burning-bush visions, ayahuasca-spawned dreams, the overwhelming encounter with the Sublime, the Absolute, God, Infinity. This meaning rushes down the calcified canyons of our sandstone sulci and gneissic gyri; a flash flood in our brain’s labyrinth of slot canyons, washing away other possible meanings of the word.
Yet all experience is ineffable, not only the transcendent bits. For example, walk down the beverages aisle of a store. You cannot describe the taste of each drink, from orange juice to milk, any more than you can explain the sight of red to a blind person. Your mouth has an arrangement of taste buds no one else possesses, and you have an immense set of unique memories and emotional associations with each taste.[1] Where else have you tasted this flavor? What music was playing? What were you feeling? All these factors and countless more influence taste. For example, many Americans say pumpkin soup tastes like home. A simple broth is wired in the brain to an inexpressible feeling. We have agreed on four letters for this feeling – h o m e – and think we are all speaking of the same thing. Words package experiences the same way containers package tastes. It is important to remember the word is not the experience just as the container is not the taste.
If you are still in the store, look at the packaging. Each branded bottle, from Odwalla to Honest Tea to Coke, contains an indescribable taste. The store is also a package, made of concrete, rebar, and fluorescent lights rather than clear plastic. It is a package for packages. The city wraps the store, the store wraps the fridges, the fridges wrap the containers, and each container wraps a liquid. Words are also just packages upon packages. Like the bottle around the drink, simple onomatopoeias wrap an experience directly: “oof,” “roar,” “agh.” To neologize more, we then wrap these building-block words with drier words, more distant from direct experience. As Nietzsche describes this wrapping process,
“It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things–metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”[2]
All words are flimsy metaphors, wrapping-paper around incommunicable experiences. Attempting to equate your experience with another after hearing their words is like saying two boxes have identical contents after seeing only their drab cardboard facades. At the apex of the packaging of experience, we reach the wasteful white-speak of academia: demonstration, consultation, nonetheless, domain, intersection, paradigm, ultimately. The same drive that makes us manufacture endless plastic leads us to create ever more words as wrapping. Concision is resistance to word waste as recycling is resistance to plastic waste.
To read is to hear the crinkle of wrapping-paper, to feel the dry cardboard we use to wrap up amorphous existence. How do we force the living substrate of experience into inanimate paper? If experience is ineffable, how do we eff it? This is the miracle of language. With each movement of our mouths we create words from a wordless world as a god creates form from formless void. Barrow begins his work with the simple phrase: “deciding on a book’s beginning is as complex as determining the origins of the universe.” Each moment involves trillions of interacting particles, endless emotions we can’t understand or communicate, and the culmination of millennia of biological, physical, and cultural histories. And even as we try to come up with a word, the moment has already passed: words are reactive and reflective, not simultaneous with experience. Just as a cartographer always maps a territory after exploring it, we always describe our existence after experiencing it. In this sense experience is an ever-moving eel and language is our attempt to pin it down. Yet we can almost instantaneously stick labels to our experiences. How do we apply glue and paper to a nebulous, fleeting eel?
All words are labels on the un-labelable, incomplete metaphors. In this sense, all words are lies. This is the draw to a vow of silence. If the sacred is inexpressible, then attempting to express it is defilement. And if speech is not the defilement of some religious or transcendent concept, then at least it is a betrayal the self, a reckless revealing of the sacred internal:
“Speech…is essentially a public act. It is an act necessarily objective and universal. To speak is to give up one’s individuality in order to reveal oneself in the universals of language. One strips oneself of idiosyncrasies, and ultimately, if set on verbalizing all experience, one strips experience itself of any content…which does not fit the structure of language.”[3]
Monastic silence’s appeal is its protection of the sacred and the understanding that comes with freedom from linguistic structure. Just as some call upon God to fill gaps in our knowledge, some monks might argue God occupies the gaps in our speech. In his book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, Cardinal Robert Sarah argues exactly this: “silence is not an absence. On the contrary, it is the manifestation of a presence, the most intense of all presences.”[4] Sociological research into an order of Benedictine nuns who live by the credo “Silence is a beautiful hymn we sing to God” found that their silence reduces “verbal competitiveness (jostling for attention in conversations) and increases sincerity and empathy in their rare conversations.[5] Silence opens up new routes to unspoken communication.
Words are to teeth as silence is to the tongue. When we use words, we are forced to bite down on an idea. Our teeth are tools to cut comestibles up into atoms, break them apart so our saliva can pour into the gaps and begin the analytic chemical dismantling of the object. We crunch the item under the strength of our ivory incisors just as we confine a concept into crisp, monochrome, 12-point words. But we must let some ideas rest on the roof of our mouths, push them with the tongue rather than biting or swallowing. Using the tongue well allows us to explore rather than vanquish. Just as we cannot see the grandeur of the Grand Canyon by breaking it into discrete units of property, drawing lines and ripping it apart in search for extractable resources, we cannot conquer a concept. We must seduce it, and seduction is the art of the tongue. When we use words, we put ourselves in the same hell as Tantalus. His curse was that he needed to eat, to force his mandibles upon nutrients, and never have his hunger sated. Chomping down on ideas will prevent us from reaching filling understanding.
Poetry and silence allow us to abandon the urge to bite and begin to glory in the mysteries and paradoxes of life. Where the logician tortures herself, the poet revels. It is easy to dismiss myth, story, parable, and poetry as unverifiable rubbish, meaningless language that should not be pursued as its referents cannot be demonstrated. But perhaps these forms of expression are just using the tongue rather than the teeth:
“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.”[6]
A monk with a vow of silence does not verbalize her reason for quiet. Doing so would break her vow. Rather, she expresses as the trees: through whispering of aspens, the listening of tranquil oaks, the mosaic of sunlight marbled by the veins of leaves. For her, poetry is not a poem, an iterative list of words. Poetry is a life lived, the ineffable complexity of moment upon moment. As C.S. Lewis writes in Prince Caspian —
“‘Oh, Trees, Trees, Trees,” said Lucy (though she had not been intending to speak at all). ‘Oh, Trees, wake, wake, wake. Don’t you remember it? Don’t you remember me? Dryads and Hamadryads, come to me.’ Though there was not a breath of wind they all stirred about her. The rustling noise of the leaves was almost like words … Lucy felt that at any moment she would begin to understand what the trees were trying to say. But the moment did not come. The rustling died away … Yet Lucy had the feeling (as you sometimes do when you are trying to remember a name or a date and almost get it, but it vanishes before you really do) that she had just missed something.”[7]
This is the same feeling we get when we try to grasp Nothing. We immerse ourselves in the concept, and at moments we feel we are onto something. We might think we have the Absolute in our teeth, gripped and white-knuckled. It is pinned down. Nothing named. The ethereal explained. All systems united into a grand Theory of Everything. Then somehow the silence vanishes, and our understanding goes with it.
Silence is not the mere negation of words, not-speaking. Just as there are many tones of voice, there are shades of silence. We can practice dismissive silence, to communicate rejection: the silence of an angry lover, or an academic who does not speak on unverifiable topics he considers unimportant. There is silence as a symbol of apathy, the silence of a bored student. There is the raised-hand silence of the impatient on the edge of speech. There is the silence of staring at the stars, silence as a symbol of deep appreciation of the natural world. We can use silence to communicate confusion, reflection, sleep, hatred, fear, and countless more. Silence, as it often contains more meaningful content, can be louder than speech. And silence is often more difficult than speech. Even when our mouths are not moving, we squish silence in our brains before it can begin to grow, noticing something, anything, and if it is not there — we generate it.
As modern humans and especially as inhabitants of the academic tower, we are trained in symbolic languages. We learn to write code, uncover literary motifs, dissect art, communicate with multiple languages, to create mathematical models to simplify the world and machines to simplify our interactions with it. In other words, we understand the signifiers, but we rarely delve into the signified. Sometimes we forget there is an ineffable reality beyond the symbolic languages we are trained to manipulate. Silence is the escape from this symbolic economy. Silence does not demand using symbols, applying labels, or biting down on ideas.
This essay argues that all experience is ineffable. As ineffable means inexpressible and sacred, using language to convey experience utters the unutterable and violates the sacred. Silence allows us to avoid this violation, and to communicate and listen in ways that are preempted by the spoken and written word.
To conclude? Conclusion is as impossible as beginning.
FOOTNOTES
Harry T. Lawless, Hildegarde Heymann. Sensory Evaluation of Food: Principles and Practices. Springer Science: New York, New York 1999. Print. ↑
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Taylor Carman. On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings. Harper Perennial, 2010. Print. ↑
Cardinal Robert Sarah, Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise. Libraire Artheme Fayard: Paris, France 2016. Print. ↑
Wichroski, Mary Anne. Breaking Silence: Some Fieldwork Strategies in Cloistered and Non-Cloistered Communities. Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1996. Print. ↑
Bohr, Neils and Maria Popova. “Nobel-Winning Physicist Niels Bohr on Subjective vs. Objective Reality and the Uses of Religion in a Secular World.” BrainPickings.org. N.d. Web. 21 Apr 2019. ↑
Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia. New York, N.Y.: Collier Books, 19701951. Print. ↑
Written for Seminar: Into the Silence w/ Prof Huntington / 5.6.201
“Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.” — Diogenes of Sinope
Taneda Santōka echoes this sentiment throughout For All My Walking, an unassuming manual for practicing the virtue of poverty. Wandering in ascetic indigence gives Santōka unique insights to expand his understanding of Buddhism. His homelessness allows him to see decadent Japanese society through the eyes of the poverty-stricken. Santōka is therefore part of a tradition of Zen Buddhist thinkers who do not fulfill any orthodox metric of success — stability, academic respect, status, health, long-term relationships, or wealth — but are admired in Japan for their authenticity and wisdom. In this sense, the homeless Santōka is meaningfully employed: he provides essential reflections on the life of a destitute poet.
The origins and nature of Santōka’s poverty
Santōka was not born into poverty. His family epitomizes the Japanese aphorism Oya kurō suru, ko raku suru, mago kojiki suru (“The parent works hard, the child takes it easy and the grandchild begs”), as his father inherited and squandered a fortune.[1] His bourgeois childhood is visible in this early poem from 1911: “In a café we debate decadence a summer butterfly flits” (Hiroaki 23). The irony is glaring here: in a café, a symbol of affluence, a group of wealthy students discuss decadence. The season phrase in the haiku, “summer butterfly flits,” is also a symbol of fluttering and trivial leisure. At only 29, Santōka has piercing insights into the contradictions of the class he was born into.
The voice of this carefree Santōka is rarely audible in his later writings. By the years of For All My Walking, he thinks of himself as “nothing but a beggar-monk” (Taneda, 42). Several processes brought Santōka down from the moneyed pinnacles of Japanese society, but there were two key turning points: (a) his mother’s suicide, and (b) the bankruptcy of his father’s sake brewery. The psychological trauma of these events and the loss of his family’s wealth preceded a crushing sequence of tragedies. Over the next five years, Santōka’s brother committed suicide, his grandmother died, he left his family to find work in Tokyo, and then he divorced his wife. Finally, the last living remnant of Santōka’s old life, his father, perished in 1920.
But the trauma did not die. It haunted Santōka for the rest of his life. He was left with at least two psychological ghosts that impeded him from conventional success: first, his near addiction to sake, and second, a severe mood disorder. The ghost of sake is one of the recurring threads in Santōka’s work. As he summarizes his view of the substance For All My Walking,
I like sake so I’m not going to give it up and that’s that—nothing to be done about it. But drinking sake—how much merit do I acquire doing that? If I let sake get the best of me, then I’m a slave to sake, in other words, a hopeless case! (Santōka, 48)
He seems less self-aware of the second ghost, although it is apparent in his works. As the translator writes, “from a mood of elation he sinks into all-but-suicidal despair” (22). Many of his poems are cheerful observations on the sublime beauty of nature or the kindness of humans. Others condemn the futility of existence: “Flypaper / no outs— / yell in a loud voice / till you’re dead” (70). This “nervous disability” impaired Santōka endlessly, from his brief stint in academia to his marriage (16). The twin demons of sake and manic-depressive disorder cling to both Santōka’s life and his poetry.
Debilitating psychological ghosts and the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” thwarted Santōka forays into normal careers. He was therefore pushed to live in reflective, meandering poverty: “Talentless and incompetent as I am, there are two things I can do, and two things only: walk, and compose poems” (20). His poverty is both a symptom and a cause of his poetry — he is a poet because he cannot make money, and he cannot make money because he is a poet. Or perhaps both have a common root in the trauma and tragedy that marred his life. Regardless: after leaving the monastery, Santōka lived the rest of his days in poverty and poetry.
The value of poverty in For All My Walking
Although Buddhism taught him detachment from material possessions, Santōka struggled to accept being a mendicant poet. Sometimes he waxes grateful about this austere life: “when I think of it / the life I live / is way better than I deserve” (43). But he often subjects himself to intense diatribes. At one point he expresses that he would prefer starvation: “Even if it means nothing to eat, I don’t want to do any more of that hateful begging!” (67). He even questions whether he deserves the sporadic charity he receives:
“Stop to think about it, I’m not qualified to receive alms. Only those of the level of arhat or above are entitled to. So it’s only natural that I meet with refusal. If I do my begging with this much understanding and resignation, then begging will become a kind of religious practice” (68).
This passage illustrates a broader theme in Santōka’s life: his use of Buddhism to understand and improve himself. He tempers each of his brutal self-critiques with some fragment of Buddhist philosophy. In this way, his everyday encounter with poverty encourages Santōka to delve into Buddhism. As he walks through the physical world of Japan, tasting diverse dialects and mountains, he also walks through the conceptual world of Buddhism and the emotional world within himself.
Much of the profundity of For All My Walking comes from Santōka’s experience with poverty. For example, this shining piece touches on individualism, summarizes the common view on poverty, and adds Santōka’s honest self-analysis:
“Nothing for me to do but go my own way. My own way—that’s unconditional. Without noticing, without realizing, I’ve let myself get slovenly. I’ve gotten used to being given things and forgotten about giving. I make things easy for myself, and I despair of myself. It’s all right to be poor, but not to stink of poverty.” (75)
It is unclear whether Santōka is expressing his own opinion or repeating some bromide about the “slovenly poor” he internalized during his stint in the leisure class. But the writing is extremely nuanced. Santōka is lauding the need to live his own life, the artist against the world. However, he also rejects the urge to let himself go and become slovenly – allowing sake, laziness, and self-pity to consume his mind. This complex thinking, simply expressed and inspired by poverty, is one of Santōka’s distinguishing marks.
Furthermore, Santōka’s poverty allows him to juxtapose the Japanese leisure class with the backbreaking paucity of the lower class. For example, he reflects on quotidian economic injustices: “a day laborer sweating from morning to evening, if a man makes 80 sen, if a woman, 50 sen” (43). He also sees the painful mundanity of the “Elevator girl” spending her exuberant youth “going up going down / saying the same words over and over / the long long day” (107). I have felt this deadening routine of menial labor. Santōka could have written a similar haiku about the modern world: “Drive thru girl / opens window, closes window / the same packaged meals and words / to car after car / the long long day.” Ultimately, Santoka realizes there is “no help / for the likes of me,” and therefore decides to “go on walking” (23). This is the tragedy of those who fall through the cracks of society and have no recompense.[2] These lines also show the power of haiku: rich observations channeled into a few lines can have immense impact.
Japan was a profoundly stratified society during Santōka’s life. The graph on the right comes from a paper on income inequality that reinforces Santoka’s observations, finding that “a degree of income concentration was extremely high throughout the pre-WWII period during which the nation underwent rapid industrialization” (Moriguchi, 2). Many of his writings reflect this broad trend with small but effective on-the-ground observations of poverty in Japan. However, Santōka did not use his haiku for social activism. Perhaps that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Furthermore, Santōka’s poverty expands his gratitude. This can be summarized in a single poem: “there were hands / to scratch / the itchy places” (24). Santōka had many itchy places: poverty, problems in Japan, nagging innkeepers, annoying traveling companions, straw hats leaking,[3] trauma from his past, his volatile mood, and many more. But he is grateful for his means of overcoming itches: the method of Buddhism, the outlet of haiku, and the escape of sake. He has hands with which to scratch.
Seeking to create economic value can inhibit candid reflection. His intentional poverty frees Santōka from this pursuit. As such, he can reflect upon nature instead of viewing it as a means of production: “Westerners try to conquer the mountains / people of the East contemplate the mountains / patiently I taste the mountains” (44). Santōka can taste nature fully because he has no need to consume it. And as he is not seeking employment or relying on patronage, he can speak his mind and avoid being another regurgitator of platitudes: “If there is anything good in my life — or I should say, good in my poems — it comes from the fact that they are not contrived, they tell few lies, they’re never forced” (77). Nomadic poverty is vital to Santōka’s wisdom, as it frees him from the economic rat-race.
Finally, Santōka’s poems are primarily descriptive and not prescriptive. Much of the simple beauty of the book comes from judgement-free musings. He does not have wealth, power, or great status, and therefore does not have the high ground to be moralistic. As such, he makes observations instead of judgements, and emphasizes rather than criticizes. Like Herman Melville, he realizes that “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” His poverty therefore frees Santōka from the pressure to evaluate, manipulate, or make judgements upon other people and existence itself.
We have investigated the causes and characteristics of Santōka’s poverty as well as its unique value. Through his begging Santōka learns the arts of humility, compassion, social criticism, judgement-free reflection, and self-acceptance. These virtues are so difficult to attain it is no wonder that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”[4] Santōka ultimately realizes he has to unapologetically embrace his destitution, writing that “People are happiest when they can be who they really are. A beggar has to learn to be an all-out beggar” (65). This authentic self-embracement becomes Santōka’s simple justification for his life: “by venturing to do something so ludicrous as walking in the modern world, I, who am not very clever, justify my existence” (45). Conclusively, poverty contains a wealth of understanding.
WORKS CITED
Sato, Hiroaki (2002). Grass and Tree Cairn. Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press. Print.
Santōka, Taneda (2003). For All My Walking. Translated by Burton Watson. Columbia University Press. Print.
Santōka, Taneda. Walking By My Self Again. Translated by Scott Watson. Bookgirl Press, 2011. Print.
Moriguchi, Chiaki and Emmanuel Saez. The Evolution of Income Concentration in Japan, 1885
2002: Evidence from Income Tax Statistics. Boston University Press: Boston, MA. Print.
FOOTNOTES
See page 12 of For All My Walking — “His father seems to have been a rather weak-willed man who spent his time dabbling in local politics, chasing after women, and in general dissipating the family fortune, which had been of considerable size at the time he fell heir to it.” ↑
This understanding comes from his poverty: he sees the ways he is marginalized and has empathy for those who are also marginalized. He recognizes that it is almost impossible to understand this perspective from the outside —”People who have never done any begging seem to have difficulty understanding how I feel about this” (67). Siddhartha Gautama himself could not understand poverty until personally witnessing it outside his palace. ↑
“What, even my straw hat has started leaking” — Santōka, Walking By My Self Again, pg 22. ↑
Loving authentically is a daunting project rife with almost inescapable pitfalls. In this essay, I will first explore Sartre’s novel theory of love developed within his broader phenomenological ontology. Under this theory, the purpose of love is to escape from the Look and the groundlessness of existence. Then, I will critique his understanding from Beauvoir’s more socially situated perspective. Finally, I will use these concepts to conduct a philosophical analysis of love in Camus’ existential novel The Stranger. Sartre’s construct of love is promising but insufficient to describe the human condition as a whole and must be modified to account for power structures that warp relations between lovers. With this modified theory of love, using conceptual tools from both Sartre and Beauvoir, we can elucidate key elements of The Stranger. Ultimately, the joint Sartrean-Beauvoirean conception of love as a flimsy and ephemeral pursuit founded on bad faith can seem pessimistic. It is. However, my argument is that this theory is rooted in accurate existential underpinnings. I conclude by positively re-framing authentic love as a near-unattainable but powerful ideal that may still be worth striving toward.
“East” (2015) by Rebecca Bird, acrylic on panel, 30” x 40”. Painted at the Niagara Falls, which Rebecca views as a “symbol of the perfect unattainable romance.” Some kind of humanoid shape also seems to be visible beneath the waves – a face on the right side? Moving toward the left, shapes like organs and a body?
I. The Sartrean Concept of Love
As Sartre’s analysis of love relies on the basic conceptual triad of his work, a brief review of being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and being-for-others is necessary. The in-itself is unconscious being – an object. The for-itself is conscious being – a subject. The for-itself requires a concrete object as its foundation and is thus grounded in the in-itself, but it also negates the in-itself. Sartre gives the example of feeling the “absence” of a person: when a friend is not present, I do not see them, but their lack (their negation) is visible to me. Through imagination (the magic of consciousness), we are able to see beyond the factical features of our surroundings: the object to my right and left, the light reflecting off my retinas, the structure and current state of my body. Sartre sees this imaginative transcendence as the defining feature of consciousness. As conscious humans, we transcend the “given” features of our situation (our facticity) and are always more than just our objecthood.
When one being-for-itself encounters another, a new ontological category arises: being-for-others. The Other is a being-for-itself like me, but one which possesses a foreign internal world I can never access – including a radical freedom to take up its own perspectives. When I meet the Other’s eyes, I experience the Look: the moment when a for-itself realizes it is not just a subject, but also a mere object in the Other’s world. I am a character in another person’s dream. This interrupts my “unreflective consciousness,”[1] as I can now reflect on my object-self; I recognize this version of myself in the Other’s eyes and this can create shame over what I see. The Look, and the caustic reactions it generates, led Sartre to exclaim “hell is other people,”[2] as being-for-others caged him in the Other’s eyes, scathed by their uncontrollable perceptions and evaluations. Our desperation to avoid being trapped in our objecthood by the Look leads us to pursue many escape routes – including love.
“Fairytales After Dark,” Edited Photograph by Lissyelle Laricchia, from her series “Play Pretend”
During being-for-others, we no longer possess ourselves, which creates staggering insecurity. Since I cannot control or even truly see the Other’s view of me, but this view constitutes my identity, the Other holds “the secret of what I am. He makes me be.”[3] Without my input, “it confers values upon me and removes them from me.”[4] Thus, being-for-others is fraught with conflict like Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: a perpetual cycle of subject-object relations in which both sides seek to out-transcend the Other.[5] We seek to remain subjects while turning the Other into an object. However, we also want the Other to use its free subjectivity to reveal our identities and affirm our existence.
This explains why the lover wants to be loved: love is the project of reclaiming his being by making the Other’s freedom subject to his own. But love would be simple if it only required physical possession. Instead, it entails capturing a consciousness, a task as daunting as caging a ghost. The lover wants the Other to freely choose to love him in each moment, to will her own captivity and become “both free and yet chained” in the lover’s hands.[6] Love is freedom’s willing self-enslavement. The lover desires to be the boundary of his beloved’s transcendence and limit of their freedom: “if the Other loves me then I become the unsurpassable.”[7] In love, he seeks to become the “center of reference” for the lover, the wellspring of all meaning, an absolute end to which everything else is merely a means.[8] Declarations like “I would kill for you” imply that all morality is subordinate to their partner.
“Melody of Rain” (2015), Michael Cheval. This absurdist art might help communicate the fluidity of conscious experience – the way our imagination shapes reality – but also the record player may represent the authentic lover; to maintain the illusion of love one’s partner is the only sound one hears mentally, drowning out all else.
Love allows an escape from the acerbic Look by catalyzing a metamorphosis in how the lovers apprehend the world. The lover does not encounter their beloved as a thing among things, or as a being to be compared to other beings. Rather, their beloved is the ultimate totality though which everything else is understood. The lover views the world through the lens of their beloved. Thus, love “no longer fixes me in what I am,” as the lover’s Look does not suffocate me in my finitude as an object.[9] In a genuine lover’s eyes, I cannot be ugly, wretched, or dumb; but neither as beautiful, impressive, or intelligent. Those are qualities that apply to contingent and relative objects, and they are meaningless when both lovers see the other as the absolute root of all value. Even my own actions and traits cannot define me. Thus, Sartre might say that if I have reasons to love someone, e.g. for their concrete attributes, I do not love them. I merely prefer their properties to the properties of other objects. Love is an absolute choice to establish another for-itself as the crux of one’s world and keystone of all values.
Love also liberates the participants from two of the most agonizing responses to the Look: fear and alienation. Fear is the feeling of being in danger as an object at the whims of the Other’s freedom. I am terrified because at any moment the Other can “constitute me as a means to ends of which I am ignorant.”[10] Alienation is the recognition of my slavery to the Other, as I am subject to their unknowable and uncontrollable evaluations of me: “Insofar as I am the object of values which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this qualification or even to know it, I am enslaved.”[11] I am alienated from my own possibilities and become subjugated by the Other’s freedom. When the lover is alone with her beloved, she is rescued from fear and alienation, as she is the endpoint of the Other’s freedom and foundation of their values.
Through love the groundlessness of existence is supplanted by the feeling that our lives are justified. In our normal condition, life is absurd, unjustifiable, and superfluous. We exist as a brute fact, the consequence of a series of contingent events beyond our freedom, a consciousness whose being is rooted in nothingness. When we are loved, “we now feel that our existence is taken up and willed even in its tiniest details by an absolute freedom.”[12] Who are we to dispute this justification? If we accept it, we are rescued from what Sartre calls the “unthinkable and insurmountable given which I am fleeing.”[13] If the Other is willing to make us the foundation of its being, we are handed the keys to Eden: we now have an essence and a meaning given to us. The Fall is reversed.
“Keyhole to Eden,” by Jane on Youtube, painting on canvas. This is perhaps what we glimpse at the peak of the escape from groundlessness which love offers.
Theorizing love in this way makes it into a sublime ideal, a pinnacle of existence: the joy of finding one’s self-identity in the Other, of having a solid ground for living, and of escaping the Look. A lover provides us with objectivity in the anguish of a subjective world. But how can this be achieved? Here Sartre grows more pessimistic. He describes the triple destructibility of love – three vulnerabilities that make love a perilously fragile activity.
First, to love is to “to wish that the Other wish that I love him,”[14] which creates perpetual dissatisfaction. Love is a double bind: if the Other loves me, he will want to become the object of my ability (as a free subject) to ground his existence. He wants to avoid the nausea of subjectivity. But in love I also want to have my existence justified by the Other’s subjectivity. If I get what I want, I cannot get what I want. The catch 22 is that “the more I am loved, the more I lose my being,”[15] the more I am tossed away from my elusive object-self and back into my subjecthood and my own freedom. We seek the solidity of being defined by another, but “the Other is on principle inapprehensible; he flees me when I seek him and possesses me when I flee him.”[16] Reciprocated love is like two sinking ships bailing water into each other while trying to remain afloat. Neither partner can provide a ground for the other’s existence. Both are locked in total subjectivity, and nothing can relieve them of the agonizing duty to define their own meaning to existence.[17] Maybe it is too much to ask that love give ground to our lives in a groundless world.
“Painting of sinking of MS PILSUDSKI, Polish troop carrier,” by marine artist Adam Werka. Portrays the turmoil of an ungrounded life (which all human lives are, even if we’re unaware of it). This drowning prompts desperation for another sinking ship to help bail out one’s already foundering one.
On the same note, the process of becoming-in-love contains the seeds of its own ruin. In trying to make the Other fall in love with me (seduction), I preempt the possibility of genuine love. The structure of seduction is similar to that of pride. In Sartre’s view, pride is a response to shame in which I take responsibility for my objecthood. To the Other, I appear as an object, and in pride I attempt to improve this object’s properties so others will admire me. I try to make the Other see me as more intelligent, attractive, or successful. But pride is destined to fail. After all, I want the Other to freely choose to admire me, but I also undermine the Other’s freedom by attempting to control their view of me. Therefore, “the feeling which I demand from the other carries within itself its own contradiction since I must affect the Other with it in so far as he is free.”[18] Seduction is a sophisticated form of pride, and the joy of successfully making the Other fall in love is rooted in the pride that a free consciousness “gives us a positive evaluation.”[19] Seduction is self-defeating task because it involves attempting to manipulate the Other into freely choosing love.
Second, love involves the perpetual risk that the Other will awaken from the slumber, realize no real chains are binding their freedom, and choose to see me as an object. They may subject me to the Look, evaluating me and comparing me to others based on the properties of my object-self: my appearance, my traits, my actions. In any case, this violation of the underpinnings of love means “the spell is broken; the Other becomes one mean among means.”[20] Love’s intricate exercise in smoke and mirrors falls apart, and the illusion shatters.
The final weakness of love involves the moment in which both lovers are subjected to the Look by a third party. This causes the lovers to realize their objecthood together. Under the gaze of an Other who sees both lovers as objects and their relationship as relative, neither can see their lover as the absolute source of all value. Thus, Sartre declares that “one would have to be alone in the world with the beloved in order for love to preserve its character as an absolute axis of reference.”[21] The relativizing gaze of the Other annihilates love.
This is why lovers seek intimate solitude. For if the lovers remember their relationship is contingent and not absolute, the foundation of their meaning will implode. After all, lovers come together through a chain of haphazard events: being born nearby, meeting at such-and-such a place, having suitable biological and psychological constitutions to attract one another, and more. Realizing this contingency undermines the absoluteness of love with the recognition that loving any particular person is merely another arbitrary choice amongst the set of possibilities available in one’s situation. Love can therefore only exist through the self-deception of bad faith: lovers tell themselves they are soulmates, meant to be, made for one another.[22] They deny the contingencies involved so they can see their love as a necessity. Their love may be a satisfying foundation for meaning only if they are successful in preserving this fantasy.
The travails of seeking authentic love can lead people to resign to the attitudes of masochism and sadism. In masochism, “I refuse to be anything more than an object.”[23] I immerse myself in the Other’s subjectivity while attempting to renounce my transcendence, deny my freedom, and consent to my own alienation. This attempt is useless, because anytime the masochist seeks to extinguish his own subjectivity and become a mere object – e.g. by paying someone to whip him – he implicitly recognizes his own subjectivity. He is using the Other as a means to treat himself as a means. Masochism is a self-undermining attempt to flee transcendence by drowning in facticity.
Sadism is the equally hopeless attempt to do the opposite: become pure transcendence by fleeing facticity. The sadist purges away his own objecthood by treating Others as objects, revealing “by force” the Other’s flesh while denying the fact that he is also flesh.[24] The contradiction is that the sadist relies on the awareness that the Other they abuse is a genuine subject – they wouldn’t be satisfied to whip a wood desk. Despite this cognizance, they pretend the Other is only an object. The sadist is as self-deluded as the masochist.
II. Love and The Second Sex
“De Beauvoir vs. Sartre” (2014), by Adam Mohrbacher. Color Pencils and Ink. One of the most dynamic duos in the history of philosophy.
Delving into Beauvoir’s work is essential to understanding Sartrean love. First, Sartre’s view of love was almost certainly rooted in his own experiences, and his most significant love was Beauvoir herself. As she avowed, “The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves.”[25] Love was a lifelong conversation between the two thinkers. Their concepts of love were interdependent and studying both together yields a richer understanding. Second, it would be myopic to rely only on a man’s view of love. While Sartre seemed to assume his analysis of love applied to all humans, Beauvoir argued that women experience love differently. Her critique reveals a consistent flaw in Sartre’s philosophy: his ideas are not socially situated enough to see imbalances in being-for-others created by disparities in power.
Beauvoir begins her critique with a quote from Nietzsche:
“The single word love in fact signifies two different things for man and woman. What woman understands by love is clear enough: it is not only devotion, it is a total gift of her body and soul, without reservation…if there should be men who also felt that desire for complete abandonment, well, then they simply are – not men.” [26]
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 362, pg. 318.
Clearly this is an instance of the No True Scotsman’s fallacy—when Nietzsche sees exceptions to the rule, he changes the rule to exclude those exceptions from consideration; thus those who do not fit his definition are not “true men.” However, Beauvoir finds his characterization of the differences in gendered love accurate. Using the Sartrean terms, “feminine” love is characterized by the masochistic attempt to escape subjecthood, while “masculine” love by the sadistic attempt to escape objecthood. This patriarchal structure precludes authentic love. The man is taught to avoid seeing the Other as the origin of all values, and the woman is conditioned to negate her own subjectivity. The delicate illusion of love cannot be maintained, as both parties see only one side of the Other (either objecthood or subjecthood). Furthermore, neither can see their relationship as an absolute necessity because its contingent relativity is so glaring.
This condition is especially confining for the woman. As Beauvoir writes, women are “shut up in the sphere of the relative, destined to the male from childhood, habituated to seeing in him a superb being whom she cannot possibly equal.”[27] Recall that in Sartre’s authentic love, the beloved becomes the center of the lover’s universe. The woman in love clearly fulfills this condition, as for her “the measure of values, the truth of the world, are in his consciousness,” and she “tries to see with his eyes.”[28] But this is insufficient: the relationship is not reciprocal, as she is not the ground of the Other’s values. She becomes an object immersed in the man’s subjectivity. Therefore, she is in alienation, slavery to another’s values: “one of the loving woman’s misfortunes to find that her very love disfigures her, destroys her; she is nothing more than this slave.”[29]
Sartre did not consider that all persons might be barred from authentic love by the structures of patriarchy. After all, what the lover seeks is to attain a solid ground for his being by having another subject freely choose to love him and place him as the absolute foundation of value. This ideal is unreachable if either lover is seen as a mere object or if the love is seen as just relative. Patriarchy ensures that both of these conditions are violated. The world is in a mode of institutional bad faith which denies female subjectivity and pushes women to cement themselves in the roles of wife and mother. The woman’s transcendence is annihilated, and her possibilities are constrained to one all-consuming project: “find a man who will take the place of the father in establishing for her an objectified identity and creating a world in which she can live it out.”[30] Furthermore, as the man sees her as merely one means among many other means, and their relationship as contingent, neither can imagine that their love is truly absolute.
Beauvoir contests Sartre’s naïve assumption that both parties in relationships are on equal footing and both experience the same pressures and traps on the path to love. Power structures often distort relations between men and women, binding women to crushing objecthood, and preventing men from placing their female partners as the absolute center of their moral and perceptual universe. Men and women are trapped in attitudes of sadism and masochism respectively. This is a fundamental issue that may permanently preclude the possibility of authentic love itself:
“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.” [31]
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 664.
Therefore, Sartre’s vision of love is only potential, not actual. Concrete conditions prevent love from manifesting in the way he describes.
III. An Existential Analysis
of Love in The Stranger
Mersault’s being-with-others is characterized by indifference; he does not think relationships can change his fundamental absurd condition. His mother’s death does not have an emotional impact, and he concludes “that, really, nothing had changed.”[32] His most important relation, with Marie, is ostensibly romantic but is actually devoid of love. This is strange in a Camus novel, as love lies at the heart of his ethics: “I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.”[33] I argue that Camus is using this relationship to evoke an understanding of inauthentic love and its fundamental paucity.
Mersault constantly describes Marie in terms of her appearance – her objecthood. He never refers to any of her non-cosmetic features. She always manifests as a body in his eyes, as facticity rather than as transcendence: he describes how he “brushed against her breasts,[34] how “she moved toward me with her whole body to offer me her lips,”[35] how “she was glistening all over with salty water,”[36] how “all I could see was the sparkle of her teeth and the little folds of her eyes,”[37] “the little pout of her lower lip,”[38] “her striped dress and her sun-tanned face.”[39] In this way, Mersault maintains his subjectivity as the freedom which looks and acts upon an object of flesh. He remains a transcendent conscious mind, and she becomes a mere body.
Whenever their relationship risks becoming more substantial than a subject-object dialectic, Mersault acts to re-establish Marie’s status as an object: “Marie looked at me with her eyes sparkling. I kissed her. We didn’t say anything more from that point on. I held her to me.”[40] While this interaction may seem insignificant, a philosophical analysis reveals key undertones. When Marie gazes at Mersault, she threatens to transcend him, toppling his status as the subject by placing him under the Look. She could become the subject looking at Mersault as an object. He kisses her to avoid this fate and remain transcendent. After he acts, she is silent, and Mersault is not reminded of her subjecthood. In Sartre’s words, the goal of the caress is to treat the Other as a mere instrument in the midst of the world: “her consciousness, which played on the surface of her flesh and which I tried to taste with my flesh, disappears under my sight; she remains no more than an object.”[41] This is why Mersault touches Marie – to avoid encountering her as a subject.
“Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence ‘I love you.’”
— Richard O. Moore, Writing the Silences
Despite her somewhat misguided efforts to connect with him, Mersault never becomes truly Unmasked to Marie.
Clearly, Marie is just another object in Mersault’s world, a means among means. This is why he describes missing her as merely the loss of her physical form: “I used to wait patiently until Saturday to hold Marie’s body in my arms.”[42] During his stay in prison, Mersault explicitly recognizes that only his proximity to Marie’s body kept her in his mind:
“How was I to know, since apart from our two bodies, now separated, there wasn’t anything to keep us together or even to remind us of each other? Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me.” [43]
Camus, The Stranger, 115.
Of course, Mersault was not being deceptive in this relationship. He readily admits that he does not love Marie: when she asked, his response was to tell her “it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so.”[44] When he saw her on one of his last living days, he still felt indifferent: “my heart felt nothing, and I couldn’t even return her smile.”[45] He uses her body as a means of distraction, but never attempts to leap into authentic love to elude the groundlessness of Being.
However, Marie seeks to create something more. Maybe this is because she truly wants the ethereal escape of authentic love, or perhaps because marrying Mersault would fulfill the prescribed narrative for a woman. Either way, she feels the need to take the relationship forward: “she took my arm with a smile and said she wanted to marry me. I said we could do it whenever she wanted.”[46] As one of Camus character’s in another work states, “Women are different; they know that life is short, and one must make haste to love.”[47] Ultimately, this is because for women like Marie, there was no real alternative: “love was their only way out.”[48] Marie seeks something more because she must, for as a woman, “love is a supreme effort to survive by accepting the dependence to which she is condemned.”[49] In the patriarchal condition of Camus’ Algeria, women are seen as means to the ends of men. This becomes especially clear when all Mersault needs to do to exonerate Raymond for beating a girl is testify that she cheated. In this society, men’s voices constitute the only real voices.
The relationship between Mersault and Marie illustrates the fundamental conflict that prevents authentic love in a patriarchal society. Mersault as a man was trained to adopt the sadistic attitude, one focused on using lovers as objects for entertainment and as a means to reinforce his own transcendence. Each particular lover is just a contingent and temporary diversion from absurdity: he desires a woman, but comments that “I never thought specifically of Marie.”[50] On the other hand, Marie was taught to dedicate herself to a specific man, to view the world through his eyes, and see him as the absolute axis of value.
“mist eggs” by Nina Röder (2017) Photography. The way authentic love slips through one’s fingers; impossible to grasp or pick up.
This disparity means the two are always falling victim to the destructibility of love. For example, Mersault notices other women and comments on their properties: “The women were beautiful and I asked Marie if she’d noticed. She said yes and that she understood what I meant.”[51] It is not clear exactly what Marie understood. Perhaps she recognized that to Mersault she would always just be an object in the world which can be compared to other objects based on certain properties (e.g. beauty). This is the second destructibility of love: seeing one’s lover as an object shatters the illusion of mutual subjectivity. Furthermore, when the prosecutor describes Mersault’s affair from a third-person perspective, “all of a sudden Marie began to sob, saying it wasn’t like that, there was more to it.”[52] This illustrates the third destructibility, where the Other sees both lovers as objects and transforms their relationship into a contingent, relative, and arbitrary situation. Marie is desperate to believe her relationship with Mersault was anything more than contingent, but the perspective of a third-party Other undermines this belief.
“What of people who aren’t able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.“
— Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers
There are few rare moments in the novel ripe with the possibility for romantic love, but they all ultimately fall flat. Mersault describes that when he swam with Marie, “we felt a closeness as we moved in unison and were happy.”[53] This simple coexistence seems to approach Beauvoir’s description of authentic love as when each lover regards “the other simultaneously as object and as subject in a reciprocal manner.”[54] She envisioned this love as the “renunciation of all possession,” a “mutual recognition of two liberties” in which neither lover would give up their transcendence and neither would have to submit to objecthood.[55] However, the profound precariousness of love combined with the sabotaging effects of an oppressive male-centered society forestall him and Marie from ever reaching authentic love. Even still, their inauthentic relationship is a source of joy relished by both parties. Ultimately, Mersault does not ever see love as way to circumvent the meaningless folly of life.
Unnamed. By Vivian Greven.
Conclusion
The fundamental nature of Being-for-Others means that “the profound meaning of my being is outside me,”[56] as only the Other knows who I am. We therefore pursue finding ourselves in the Other through love. This being-in-love can provide a sublime but fleeting joy. But the triple destructibility of love and patriarchal social conditions synergize to make the prospect of authentic love almost hopeless. Both love’s inherent elusiveness and the socially constructed machinery which preempts authentic love are exhibited in the relationship between Mersault and Marie in The Stranger. This clear-eyed analysis seems preferable to pretending that love is not really that fragile or lowering our standards of what authentic love entails. Perhaps this lofty and difficult-to-achieve ideal makes love something worth fighting for.
Furthermore, love may be a worthwhile project even if we can never reach the ideal. As Beauvoir wrote, “An authentic love…would not pretend to be a mode of salvation.”[57] Even if it is doomed to failure, it is the closest I can ever come to experiencing the subjectivity of the Other while simultaneously being apprehended as a subject. The joy of being loved may be so inimitable that the risk and fragility involved seem inconsequential. This existential treatment of love – as a delicate, conflict-filled relation almost unavoidably doomed to failure – still leaves open the possibility that even an inauthentic or partially fulfilled form of romantic love is rewarding.
The song Goodpain by Yoke Lore exemplifies the concepts I discuss here. The need for both lovers to be “howling, keeping you between my eyes” to maintain the fragile illusion of love. The “little death inside my sides” – existential despair and emptiness which brings us to love as an escape. It also expresses that love cannot ultimately “make it right,” although it can perhaps alleviate our fear, our alienation, our shame, and our pride (the four responses to The Look).
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Wilhelm. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New
York, NY: Penguin Books, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Wilhelm. The Gay Science; with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1974.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being
and nothingness; an essay on phenomenological ontology. New York:
Washington Square Press, 1996. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. No
exit, and three other plays. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.
Chris Stevens, “A Critical
Discussion of Sartre on Love.” Stance, Vol. 1, April 2008. Pg. 5.
Ogilvy, James. “Mastery and
Sexuality: Hegel’s Dialectic in Sartre and Post-Freudian Psychology.” Human
Studies, no. 3 (1980): 201-19. www.jstor.org/stable/20008762.
Walker, Michelle Boulous.
“Love, Ethics, and Authenticity: Beauvoir’s Lesson in What It Means to
Read.” Hypatia 25, no. 2 (2010): 334-56.
www.jstor.org/stable/40602709.
Wyatt, Jean. “The
Impossible Project of Love in Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness,’ ‘Dirty Hands,’ and
‘The Room.’” Sartre Studies International 12, no. 2 (2006): 1-16.
www.jstor.org/stable/23510998.
[1] Sartre,
Jean-Paul (1966), Being and nothingness; an essay on phenomenological
ontology, New York: Washington Square Press, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. Pg.
260.
[2] Sartre,
Jean-Paul (1956), No exit, and three other plays, New York: Vintage
Books.
[30] Jean Wyatt, “The Impossible Project of Love in Sartre’s ‘Being and
Nothingness,’ ‘Dirty Hands,’ and ‘The Room,’” Sartre Studies International 12, no. 2 (2006).
About four years ago, I read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque on a Sunday in November, a lot like this one. It was painful. Paul (the “protagonist,” if there is one) is a brutal narrator. Reading most of the book in a day made his story more real, rushed, and urgent. I remember reading certain parts and shutting the book out of horror. Crying wasn’t rare.
During most of high school, I would say All Quietwas my favorite book. I’m not sure why. Not because I ‘enjoyed’ it. Only a sadist could. Maybe because it immersed me, and Paul’s voice had been inscribed on my mind. His story was more concrete and rattling than any history I’d learned before. While it is a novel and Paul did not exist in a literal sense, millions of people experienced his story. As shameful as it is to say, these millions had just never been real to me. As Camus, who lived through WWII in France, wrote:
“But what are a hundred million deaths? … Since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” — Albert Camus, The Plague, pg. 4.
Reading the book made these deaths more than just a puff of smoke; or at least, it made a few of these deaths real. Remarque turned them into ink on paper, which became thoughts and memories ingrained in neurons in my brain. Once-empty phrases gained powerful meaning: “Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world” (All Quiet on the Western Front, 46). If only the generals and political leaders of WWI were able to read this book during the war. Then again, most of them experienced the nightmarish inspiration for All Quiet firsthand, and most were still able to dissociate it from their actions and continue the war.
I feel intense anger at the generals who tossed away countless lives mindlessly. They had an attitude similar to Napoleon’s:
“You cannot stop me. I can spend 30,000 men a month.” — Napoleon Bonaparte, Letter to Klemens von Metternich
Human life is the currency of war. The WWI generals were spending it. They poured hundreds of thousands of human bodies into Verdun, the Somme, Ypres, the Marne, like they were depositing piles of cash into the morbid bank of war. The supreme commander of the Allied forces in 1918, known for being reckless with human life during the Flanders, First Marne, and Artois campaigns, said something reminiscent of Napoleon’s quote:
“It takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general.” — Ferdinand Foch (source: Nine Divisions in Champagne by Patrick Takle)
Doesn’t it sound like he’s quoting a price: we could train this general, but it will cost us 15,000 lives? Is that all the Great War was to these generals? A storm of prices, budget allocations, necessary costs, spending decisions? But behind each number was not a dollar but an individual, usually a man around my age, torn away from life and drafted into the process of destroying it en masse.
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.” — Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Ch. 10
I find it hard to imagine that these people were the same as we are. Were people just different back then? Their generation went through horrors we cannot imagine, and then went through them again in the Second World War. Could my generation survive the trenches? Could we slog through the mud of Passchendaele, our minds broken by the beating of artillery and the sight of death, and continue to fight? I think the answer is yes; but I hope we never get the opportunity to prove it.
No one would like to think they are capable of atrocity or extraordinary violence. But this belief disregards history. Many of the people who reported the Armenian genocide during WWI, who decried the Ottomans for their brutality and inhumanity, were German military officers operating in Turkey. They thought they were fundamentally different from the monsters they condemned. Twenty-one years later, some of the same people would be involved in committing Holocaust. We all have a capacity for barbarity. Only by recognizing its existence and working against it can we prevent repeating history.
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
We failed to make good on our ancestor’s promise that WWI would be the war to end all wars. It has been one hundred years, and this planet has been scarred by more atrocity, violence, and mass destruction. Perhaps more than even veterans of the Great War could imagine.
Now, we live in the most peaceful time in history by most metrics. There hasn’t been a direct confrontation between great powers since 1945. But our peace is almost as fragile as the “concert of Europe” before World War 1. Almost all of the world’s major powers could obliterate life on Earth with a nuclear war and subsequent nuclear winter. Global military spending (the combined defense spending of every country) is at an all-time high (source). Seemingly minor movements, like China’s expansion into the South China Sea and Russia’s invasion of Crimea, reveal the tension underlying the global geopolitical order.
And nationalism is making a resurgence globally. About a week ago, Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil. This is a self-proclaimed nationalist who has said things like “I’m in favor of the military regime,” “it’s all right if some innocent people die. Innocent people die in many wars,” and “The only mistake of the dictatorship was torturing and not killing” (source). Our president has said “I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Use that word” (source). Far-right parties are gaining momentum in Europe. These trends should worry anyone who has read about the first half of the 20th century.
I remember hearing that the last WWI veteran had died, when I was 13. I didn’t understand this much, but I had listened to my grandpa’s stories about Vietnam. I was wistful and even heartbroken I would never have the chance to hear about WWI from someone who was actually there. Assuming I survive for a while longer, I will probably also live through the death of the last person who fought in WWII, and the last person who experienced the Holocaust. I have a friend who is an international student from Rwanda. His parents lived through the genocide. He told me that they constantly remind him to tell his children their stories, for when the generation who remembers an atrocity disappear, the atrocity once again becomes possible. Hopefully I can be one of the minds that remembers these horrors and helps prevent them.
There are twenty-seven years until the centennial of World War II. These years should be treated as a test for humanity, everyone alive today, and our global political system. Have we overcome global war and permanently ended it? Have we finally decided to prioritize peace, human well-being, and the survival of the human species over geopolitical power games, tribalism, and the relentless struggle for limited resources? Or over these two decades, will we simply repeat what happened in the last century?
Note: Over the past month, I’ve listened to Dan Carlin’s Blueprint for Armageddon podcast about WWI. It’s amazing. It has a perfect balance between historical fact, primary sources, background info, and his personal analysis. And it is free! People (including me) pay thousands for college lectures that are far worse than this podcast. Yes, all parts combined it’s about 15 hours long. But it is important and worth it, and strung out over a few weeks of listening while driving, running, walking, etc, that isn’t that much time.
Valedictorian Speech for Maeser Prep Academy Class of 2017
I am honored to give this speech, I really am, almost as much as I am under-qualified to give it. My speech will be kind of like high school: the best part is when it’s finally over.
Street philosopher and leader of the free world, Drake, once said “Came up, that’s all me, stay true, that’s all me. No help, that’s all me, all me for real.” I just have to say, those lyrics are the opposite of how I feel right now. I am inexpressibly grateful for the people who have shaped me, inspired me, forgiven me, and helped me in endless ways.
First, my parents and family. Their patience with me is inexhaustible, and there is almost nothing that they haven’t done for me. I’m sorry I don’t appreciate you enough. I’m thankful for my friends and fellow students; you almost certainly don’t expect it, but I look up to so many of you. You have made high school an exciting, enlightening, and sometimes strange experience. And of course, our teachers. We have the most inspiring teachers the world has ever seen. There are so many teachers here who could give better advice than I ever could.
Thank you to Mr. Watabe for teaching me that math is simple, and more importantly, life is simple. If you put in the effort, you will get faster, you will get better, and you might even learn calculus.
Thank you to Mrs. Plott for making me realize that velocity is more important than speed; what direction you’re going matters more than how quickly you’re going.
I am grateful to Mr. Dowdle for redeeming humanity despite the horrors of our past, for your effortless humor, and for your life-changing analysis of literature. I’m finally in uniform, by the way.
Thank you to Mrs. Frampton, for showing me that without art, writing, and even poetry, we cannot understand the sacredness of life.
Thank you to Mrs. Martinez, for encouraging us all to be more compassionate. Through her character, she showed us there is no qualification, no skill, and no aspect of your resume that is more valuable than the effect you have on others.
And Mr. Simmons – ah, what can be said about Mr. Simmons that he has not already told in excruciating detail to his freshman Socratic class? Thank you Mr. Simmons for demonstrating the meaning of education as sacred, and for your genuine dedication to your players and students.
Thank you to Mrs. Slade, for showing us the wonder of the natural world, the miracle of the human body, and the power of human potential.
Thank you so much to Mrs. Sidwell, who isn’t here today. You introduced me to the sound of my own voice. The impact you had on my life cannot be underestimated.
I can’t list all of my teachers and mentors, but I have been changed by every class I took at Maeser – yes, even Financial Lit. Especially Financial Lit.
Maeser is one of the at the best high schools in the state. Honestly, it is easy to feel intimidated and inadequate in a school of stars like Maeser.
After all, not all of us have Logan Norris’ relentless determination;
Not all of us are as kind as Morgan Millet;
Not all of us have James Johnson’s flawless ability in acting;
Not all of us have the perfect calves of Felix Resendiz.
Few of us are as fearless as Bennett Felsted and Jared Drake,
None of us can do as many pull ups as Jacob Radmall,
And David Van Horn isn’t here, but few of us are as mature, contemplative, or understanding as him.
Not all of us are as ready to give compliments as Brittany Oveson.
None of us can beat Taylor Brand’s scoring record;
Few of us have the constant cheerfulness and optimism of Ben Hailstone or Maliana Corniea;
Few of us have the easygoing attitude of Braden Christensen;
Few of us have the quiet wisdom of Tashara Muhlstein;
None of us party as hard as Dakota Clubb;
None of us work as hard as Lia Joo;
We can’t all jump as far as Sammy Windley, sing as high as Varia Aird, or play the piano like Anastasia Felt.
None of us can parkour like Olle Hansen.
Few of us have the resilience of Mustafa Hamidi;
And even fewer of us have the hope and strength of Sophie Cannon.
I could keep going, I promise you.
But despite the fact that we can’t compare ourselves to the people around us, each of us has an opportunity – no, an obligation – to share our unique and powerful selves with the world. Growing up with you all in the last few years has been an incredible experience. Because of this, I will ask that you remember one thing after this speech: never think you have nothing original to say, never think you have nothing important to do, and never think you have no purpose.
Often, our endless routine overwhelms us like the numbing smell of burnt popcorn in the cafeteria microwaves. The beating repetitiveness of everyday life causes us to reduce ourselves to just another student, just another worker, just another brick in the wall.
People often say things like this: “I don’t have time for philosophy. I have bills to pay.” If you have not yet said this, then just wait – in college, you will say it or at least think it. How do I know this? Well, I don’t, but I’m up here making sounds, and that’s the important thing. That’s what I’m here for.
But honestly, it is easy to become swallowed up by the mundane parts of living. We should all be terrified that without even noticing, we will slip into a trivial life of grinding for grades, working for mere money, depending on empty praise, obsessing over flimsy worries and meaningless stresses, becoming something we aren’t to impress people we don’t like. Unless we watch closely, the ordinary will consume us. Unless you pay attention, your purpose will disappear like quicksand. Smooth and natural. With barely any sign you can notice or suspect. And you walk on it easily. When you’ve noticed your purpose is gone, it’s too late.
So when you find yourself saying “I don’t have time for philosophy,” remember that this is not philosophy, this is life. You don’t have enough time to not think about it. With every day, you should consider the fundamental, the deep, the sacred, the truth beyond the mundane. Otherwise, why wake up each morning?
Clear away all the debris that separates you from that essential, bright, illuminating part of yourself – that core that is much deeper than personality – your soul, your life-force, your chakra, or maybe it’s just your appendix or something. Avoid the things that reduce you and make you trivial, and look for those things that make you passionate, deep-thinking, and full.
Lin Yutang said that “Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.” Reject the idea that you can afford to merely fill or kill time; your busyness will prevent you from seeing beyond routine.
Well, as Dylan Armstrong said, I’m sorry Maeser, but I’m breaking up with you. Luckily, I’ve already set someone else set up so the rebound will be quick. She’s kind of out of my league, so I proposed to a bunch of backups in case she rejects me. Also, I’m going to need her to pay me like 50,000 dollars or it’s not going to work out. That’s basically what applying to college is.
I’ll eventually forget about my times with Maeser, but I will remember what I learned from the relationship. After all, it lasted four years, and I have done so much with Maeser – my sweat is on her field, my tears are on her desks, and yes I admit it, my popcorn is in her microwaves. I learned that the pursuit of truth, the process and journey itself, is always worth it – even if that truth is as difficult to find as a high-quality meme on Facebook. I learned to always remember my real purpose. To live beyond the mundane. To be inspired by those around me.
Now is the time to put these principles into action. As Epictetus said, “From now on, whenever you encounter anything, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event.”
And most importantly, pretend my last line was super funny.
Update three years later, 5/14/20: I wrote this before going to college. I had never studied philosophy in an academic context. After spending 3 years studying philosophy, I think this post is too cynical. Academic philosophy is better, more impactful, and more personal than I expected. I still agree with many of the ideas & sentiments I express here though.
Philosophy has been firmly and comfortably institutionalized. It exists primarily to teach useful, marketable, career-building skills, buzzwords like critical thought and complex reasoning and clear writing. Philosophers are another cog of capitalism, mass-produced in university departments to either join the economy or perpetuate the academic study of philosophy. Like physicists and biologists, they are judged by their ability to produce original, peer-reviewed work. Philosophy is a specialized field along with the sciences, practiced in research institutions.
Any ‘serious’ philosopher is found solely in the university; no longer can philosophy be practiced by any audacious questioner. Measured by gross product, philosophy is more successful and productive than at any other time in history. Thousands of philosophers throughout the world produce well-researched, logical papers that engage with the traditional problems. Many of these papers are ingenious marvels of philosophical reasoning. Who can deny the brilliance of Slavoj Zizek’s cultural criticism, John Searle’s philosophy of mind, the late Hilary Putnam’s rigorous analysis, Saul Kripke’s brilliant philosophy of language?
The institution of philosophy.
And yet perhaps we are missing something in this Cambrian explosion of philosophical activity. Philosophy has gained a permanent place in the academy. To paraphrase an introduction to “Socrates Tenured” by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle, philosophy has its own arcane language, its hyper-specialized concerns, a network of undergraduate programs, and an ecosystem of journals. Like Bertrand Russell, I wonder whether institutional philosophy is “anything better than innocent but useless trifling, hair-splitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning which knowledge is impossible.”
The goal of philosophy is no longer to guide individuals on their attempt to become paragons of wisdom and virtue. Its purpose is not to assist the philosopher in reconciling the absurdity of the world, nor can it instigate the creation of meaning out of this nihilism. It is not meant to be related subjectively to the individual who is actually living the philosophy and experiencing its effects. It is meant to produce knowledge. An honest, valuable task – yes. But it is not enough.
After all, this knowledge is produced in the typical academic fashion. It is based on rigorous, ‘impartial’ research by graduates trained in cleverly analyzing arguments. This research is then applied to produce objective knowledge that has no moral impact. I mean: the knowledge is not meant to make one a better person, but to be used as a “de-moralized tool” for civilizational progress (source). Throughout the process, the producers of knowledge remain separate from the knowledge they produce. It is sterilized, abstracted – without impact.
The philosopher argues passionately for his/her thesis, employing every art of logic available. But what if the thesis is true? No matter. It will not change the philosopher’s life nor anyone else’s. It is merely another postulate verified until refutation, another step on the track to tenure. As Kierkegaard wrote, “not until he lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate for him.” It is ridiculous to imagine the philosophers living by their theses.
All this production and institutionalization is merely disguising a catastrophe. We are facing the same problem in philosophy that Kierkegaard faced in religion: the demise of the subjective relationship. We have lost the duty to philosophy that Socrates felt and in some ways died for, the intimately personal, individual relationship to the content of our study. At his final Apology, Socrates said “as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy.” He had so fully embraced philosophy that any other form of life was “not worth living.”
Philosophy is not merely a set of practices and shared academic norms. It is a way of living. And if it fails to be a way of living, all its academia will be unmasked as hollow. Then could Nietzsche’s madman declare with certainty that along with God, the Philosopher must be buried as well – “We have killed him — you and I. We are all his murderers” (The Gay Science). Divorced from the lived experience of the philosopher, how can philosophy be meaningful? If philosophy is to have any value, it must be “through its effects upon the lives of those who study it” (Bertrand Russell).
Perhaps no one but Kierkegaard has articulated this problem in all its scope. In his Truth is Subjectivity, he wrote:
Our discussion is not about the scholar’s systematic zeal to arrange the truths of Christianity in nice tidy categories but about the individual’s personal relationship to this doctrine, a relationship which is properly one of infinite interest to him. (source)
To be a philosopher, one must take a radical leap. It is like Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, the jump into the abyss. Namely: one must be willing to live by one’s conclusions. After all, philosophy claims to both describe and prescribe reality, the ethical life, the social sphere. If this is the case, then how should we live differently because of it? If Plato is indeed correct about the immortality of the soul, what then should we do? Every philosophical premise, when carried the full length, has an ethical conclusion. They dictate what should be done.
Make the leap!
But even here we encounter a problem. We are supposed to live by our conclusions, yes, but we are also supposed to live by the method of philosophy. And yet this method questions every conclusion. How can we live by a conclusion that can be called into question and invalidated the day after? Philosophy is built upon the dialectic, the constant shift in thought and relentless doubt of each and every premise. An objector might claim that the dialectical is fundamentally antithetical to the meaningful, as a life cannot be built upon an ever-shifting foundation.
Perhaps, then, Kierkegaard’s approach is only sensical in religion. After all, religion is not dialectical. It remains solid, and thus a subjective relationship can be built. A subjective relationship to religion builds a bridge between rock-solid cliffs; a subjective relationship to philosophy builds a bridge between wind and tossing waves. One must be able to stop somewhere if a meaning of life is to be built, and religion provides the stopping-point.
Philosophy, however, is not incapable of providing meaning. It has merely been so often misapplied that it seems impossible to truly live by. The solution is this: one must be willing to set a direction for the dialectic. Kierkegaard himself did not set a rock of Christianity and declare “now, build a relationship with this!” His project was to advance, not end the dialectic. His intention was to “create difficulties everywhere” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript). He sought to push individuals to recognize the flaws of dogma, and through this to create their own relationship with Christianity independent of the traditional Nicene doctrine. But this dialectic was not unguided: its goal was to become a Christian.
This aim, in a somewhat paradoxical sense, could only be achieved by first negating it: recognizing that I am not a Christian now. Thus, the dialectic became essential to the process. The creation of a true relationship with Christianity was made possible only through destruction – through eliminating the bromides and dependence on institutions.
This same process of guided dialectic applies to philosophy. By focusing on a specific end goal, our dialectic gains a foundation. New information does not destroy the foundation. Rather, it clarifies and polishes the foundation and assists in its construction. For example, I may decide my end goal is to become a virtuous person. When I discover that one of my practices was not after all virtuous, this does not destroy my ability to live by my philosophy. After all, my end goal is not called into question. I still aim to be virtuous. But my process has been refined, as I now know one more thing that I should not aim for.
Therefore, we now have a basis for developing a personal relationship with philosophy. Before anything, an aim must be set as the goal of all dialectic. Then, we must live by this aim, constantly seeking to refine and expand it. The aim cannot be called into question. This aim is the fundamental, subjective truth, one that is lived by the individual so intensely that it cannot be invalidated. It must be of infinite significance to the individual. It should not be taught in universities, but pursued by the individual.
We must assume the end goal in order to justify the process itself. After all, if we open up our end goal to justification – and therefore criticism – how can we truly be devoted to it? It becomes merely another premise among many, one that may be quickly invalidated by a new paper in an academic journal. Only through the powerful, subjective force of faith can we believe in the end goal. (To clarify, I do not at all mean faith in the religious sense. You’ll catch my meaning as I develop the idea.)
Have faith enough, at least, to make the leap.
Faith, after all, is inevitable in life. Over the centuries, the most powerful trend in philosophy has been skepticism. We have certainly not completed Aristotle’s task of classifying and demonstrating everything, but we have made tremendous progress in Socrates’ task of calling everything into question. In a philosophy where there is no convincing demonstration of the possibility of knowledge itself, how can we claim to have a comprehensive system that eliminates the need for faith? Rather, we have merely shown the overwhelming need for faith.
Faith is a teleological suspension of doubt in the face of uncertainty. The need for this suspension derives from three fundamental and undeniable aspects of existence. First, we are uncertain at the most basic level, and unable to make a decision based on the process of systematic reasoning. Second, despite our uncertainty, we must make a decision. Third, and too often ignored, we have ends, desires, dreams – things that we feel we must accomplish or at least strive for. We may know objectively that these dreams are irrational, unjustified – and yet every individual feels a need to search after some aim. In the face of this telos, it is unacceptable to merely deny agency and revoke our ability to make a choice, and it is unacceptable to choose arbitrarily.
How can we reconcile these three facts of our existence – uncertainty, agency, and the telos? Only through faith. We ignore our uncertainty, and make the decision based on the telos, the goal. We decide our ends and believe them by faith. Every decision must be directed by this touchstone. It is constantly refined through the dialectical process, but the telos itself is never subject to the dialectic.
In his Existenzphilosophie, Karl Jaspers wrote, “Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.” The philosopher should be intimately engaged with the philosophy; it should not be an object of study, but a way of living that has infinite impact. The goal of philosophy must be reexpressed in Kierkegaard’s terms, as the search to “find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live or die.”
Humans have a relentless tendency to treat individuals as microcosms for the world. If we can identify a certain individual who fits into a group, we generalize this individual and make him/her representative of the group or concept as a whole. When we speak about these concepts or groups, we are implicitly thinking of these fetishized individuals. Thus, the ‘philosopher’ becomes Plato; the ‘drug lord’ becomes Pablo Escobar; the ‘autocrat’ becomes Hitler. These people that stand as concrete symbols for entire ideas are what I call ‘fetishized individuals.’
There is a constant political battle for control over these fetishized individuals. If someone humanizes and normalizes Pablo Escobar, they successfully humanize and normalize the drug trade as a whole. They take control of the image of the drug trade – the vivid, personalized, and individual representation. Then, when someone thinks of the drug trade, they think of Pablo Escobar – the friend of the poor, the anti-corruption, anti-communist activist, the family man.
Pablo Escobar as a criminal – the negative fetishization of a drug lord.
Pablo Escobar with a child – the positive fetishization of a drug lord.
When another representation is introduced, it is considered in the context of the existing fetish. Thus, it is extremely difficult to argue that El Chapo is terrible to convince someone who has internalized a positive version of Pablo Escobar as the representation of drug lords. Any logical argument is subordinate to their personal ideology-based ‘experience’ of Escobar. Perhaps a poor man heard Escobar gave out money in the streets and built schools for the impoverished; this gives them an emotional attachment – a fetish in a non-sexual sense – to the narrative of Pablo Escobar.
Modern political conflicts have begun using fetishized individuals in more obvious ways than ever before. The most clear example of this is Hitler, for he is the most completely fetishized person in the world. For almost everyone with an elementary education, mentions of autocracy, fascism, dictatorship, and genocide generate immediate images of Hitler with arm raised. One cannot win the ideological battle of making autocracy acceptable until one has made Hitler acceptable.
The first ideological step of neo-Nazis, therefore, is making the fetish of Hitler positive. This can be done in a variety of ways. For example, the extreme right-wing and anti-semitic site Rense.com published a series of images of the ‘hidden’ Adolf Hitler. Using these images of him – holding children, walking in gardens, smiling – makes it much harder to imagine him other contexts. We find it conceptually difficult to unite the many disparate aspects of a person into a single unified identity. How could the same Hitler that ordered the Holocaust also kiss babies? Psychological research shows that cognitive dissonance like this causes tangible pain. The drive to eliminate the dissonance, then, leads some to fetishize Hitler in a wholly positive way.
A positive fetishization of Hitler
The Netflix original Narcos powerfully represents our difficulty in categorizing individuals. You see Escobar in a variety of contexts – at home with his family, in drug labs, on a farm working, and at war. It becomes difficult to remember his horrific crimes when he is watching clouds with his young children. We can’t really conceptualize a ‘whole’ person – only the person we are seeing at the time. Uniting all the different Escobars into one unified individual is almost impossible. Ideologies take advantage of this inability to unify, and summarize individuals by a single aspect. For some, the need to resolve cognitive dissonance means forgetting Escobar’s crimes to enable a positive fetishization of his figure.
In the most recent presidential elections made fetishization a key aspect of political strategy. In 2008, Samuel Wurzelbacher asked Obama a simple question about small business tax policy – almost instantly making him a key symbol of the presidential election. He mentioned something about wanting to buy a plumbing company, and the McCain campaign leaped at the chance to relate to an ‘ordinary American.’ They coined his new name – Joe the Plumber – and repeatedly used him as an example in campaign rhetoric. McCain used the symbol of Joe the Plumber to show that Obama was ‘out of touch with the average Joe.’ It didn’t matter that Samuel wasn’t really a plumber and his name wasn’t really Joe. Throughout the campaign, writes Amarnath Amarasingam, “A fictional plumber’s false scenario dominated media discourse” (source).
In the modern election, it seems that the myth of the ordinary Joe has taken hold even more firmly. America has a need to believe in the normal citizen, a 9-5er who wants only find his dreams, stick to his moral standards, and support his family. And yes, this citizen is a he – we seem unable or unwilling to use a female figure as a symbol of American life.
Why do we feel a drive for the ordinary? After all, we are obsessing over the nonexistent. There is no ‘ordinary Joe.’ Every citizen has quirks, mistakes, sins, hidden lies, and extravagant dreams that prevent them from being ordinary. Joe can only exist as an idealized symbol, not a concrete individual. And yet the idea of the ordinary citizen is permanently entrenched in our minds. In some way, many people aspire to be average. This aspect of the psyche creates political battles over the ability to protect the ordinary individual, who stands as a metaphor for the whole American citizenry.
Thus, Ken Bone was created. He was a symbol of an ordinary person – appropriately but not excessively involved in politics, working the day job, dreaming small dreams, providing for the family. He was 2016’s version of 2008’s Joe the Plumber. He represented simple authenticity, the everyman – as his Twitter profile proclaims, he is merely an “average midwestern guy.”
He did not decide to become a meme. The media did not make him a meme; they merely capitalized on the attention once Ken Bone had already gone viral. He was not mass-produced by campaign offices and political propagandists. In an act of near-randomness, he was dubbed a meme by the distributed irrational network of sensation-seeking individuals we call the Internet. The random series of viral creations in 2016 revealed that memes are fundamentally uncontrollable. After Harambe, damn Daniel, Ted Cruz the zodiac killer, how could we be surprised that Ken Bone was crowned a meme?
Ken Bone could not even control what he himself symbolized. He attempted to control his own signifier by consistently exhorting people to vote and make their voices heard. But all his efforts, for the most part, failed. Ken Bone does not symbolize democratic participation. After all, memes are inherently dehumanizing. To become a meme, an image must be dissociated from its reality and turned into something else. In linguistics terms, it’s a sign whose signifier is malleable — the image’s meaning, thus, is created by those who share it. The meme itself has no power over its meaning.
This is the danger of living memes – they are tossed around by the whims of the Internet. And when these whims turn sour, the person suffers. Ken’s slightly quirky reddit history was revealed, and he was painted as a monster.
I expect this process to continue endlessly: an individual becomes a sign that stands as a placeholder for a piece of political ideology. The individual is the object of immense attention, and then is tossed out like discarded trash. We should be careful that our memes do not make us think this is what people truly are. And we should not be surprised when the myth of the ‘ordinary citizen’ is shattered by the reality of the individual’s life and being.
Suspend your disbelief for a moment, and imagine the 6-year-old daughter of a major world leader travels with her father to a major nuclear launch site. She is left unsupervised, and happens to wander into the launch room. There, out of curiosity, she presses the big red button.
This launches a nuclear weapon that immediately kills millions of people. Before the weapon has even detonated, other nations have launched missiles of their own. A single launch rapidly escalates to nuclear war. Billions of humans and nonhumans are killed, and the planet is left barely habitable.
This scenario is clearly implausible to the point of impossibility – the big red button, after all, doesn’t even exist. However, it is a useful archetype that raises serious questions for consequentialism. Consequentialism inadequacy in certain moral issues is clear when the accidental action of a small child leads to immense suffering. I’ll add another example that deals with similar issues, but that is far more likely.
A young boy happens to find a few matches on the floor of his family’s garage. While playing with them and scraping them across the rough floor, one of them ignites. In panic, the child rushes to the garbage and throws the match in. Then, losing interest, he walks inside and finds something else to do. The match lights a fire into the garbage which spreads into the house. The house burns to the ground, killing everyone inside. The fire spreads to nearby houses and kills or injures several more people.
This type of counterexample to consequentialism is demonstrably plausible, as there is empirical documentation of similar cases. According to the Washington Post, at least 265 Americans were accidently shot by children in 2015. Many of these shootings resulted in tragic deaths. Meanwhile, the number of American fatalities due to terrorism in 2015 was about 20, depending on certain counting methods.
In a truly consequentialist atmosphere, accidental shootings by children would be discussed far more than terror attacks – precisely 13.25 times as much. Moral deliberation on an action would be indexed to the amount of pain or happiness caused by the action. But in reality, the ethical issue of terrorism is discussed prolifically, while accidental shootings by children are virtually ignored. Why is this the case? I argue that while the amount of discussion on terrorism doesn’t reflect consequentialism, it does reflect our moral intuitions. We assign greater condemnation to actions not based on the numerical impact of these actions, but based on the intention of the actor, the nature of the action, and the emotional impact of the action.
The probability of child accidents will only increase in our modern world, as dangerous technologies proliferate and become more available, the population expands, and systems become more interconnected. A single accidental action by a child can result in unfathomable pain. However, our moral intuitions indicate that accidental actions by children are not blameworthy. Can consequentialism reconcile this problem?
“The belief that consequences are the only normative property that affects the rightness of an action.”
Or, in simpler terms, an action is made right or wrong only by its consequences. Consequences are the only morally relevant consideration.
Thus, if this essay shows that there are non-consequential normative properties that affect the rightness of an action, then consequentialism is false. I will use primarily an intuitionist approach to prove this claim – that is, showing that consequentialism is incompatible with clear moral intuitions. I will not touch on whether intuitionism is true; I will just discuss the consequences of its assumed truth.
Normative properties are defined as any ethical aspects of an action. This is a simple and non-rigorous definition that would be considered inadequate by many metaethicists, but it works well for the essay. For example, “rightness of intent” is a normative property, as it is an aspect that could impact the ethics of the action. Furthermore, this would be a non-consequential normative property.
What are the relevant normative properties in the examples above? I will consider the following:
Intent – the actor’s purpose or intended goal in a certain action.
Actor – the individual who commits the act.
Consequence – the morally relevant impacts of the action.
Different moral theories place different emphases on these properties; consequentialism is the theory that only the third property is relevant to the rightness of an action.
In the case of the child pressing the red button, I believe we have clear answers as to the ‘value’ of these properties. The consequences are certainly bad. The intent is morally indifferent, as the child did not intend for anyone to suffer nor for anyone to benefit from her pressing the button.
The most interesting property is the second. Our moral intuitions agree that the age of the actor is morally significant. If a child commits a crime, they are considered less morally responsible than adults. This intuition is ingrained in law – individuals are not usually morally responsible until the age of 18. Some religions have an ‘age of accountability,’ which makes people accountable to God for sins after it is reached. Since children are less capable of complex moral reasoning, they are less responsible for mistakes in this reasoning.
Furthermore, there are also arguments for the moral relevance of the age of the actor that are not based on intuitions. For example, the following deductive argument:
P1. One is not morally responsible for what one does not know.
P2. If one is not morally responsible for what one does not know, then people who know less than others are less morally responsible.
P3. Children know less than adults.
P4. Children are less morally responsible than adults.
Thus, when the child presses the red button, and she does not know that this will fire a nuclear weapon, she is not morally responsible for the nuclear war that ensues. This argument attempts to prove that children in general are less responsible, but it can also be applied in any case where lack of knowledge is involved. If someone does not know the consequences or nature of an action, they are not morally responsible for this action.
Based on clear moral intuitions and the above deductive argument, the action of pressing the button is either (1) less wrong or (2) morally indifferent when the actor is very young or when the actor does not know the consequences. Either case means that the actor – a non-consequential normative property – affects the rightness of the action, disproving consequentialism.
