~

In this entry, you will find a short reflection on the relationship between language and philosophy, and my fears about whether or not, because of the former, we can ever hope to learn anything substantial from the latter. 

---

One of the go-to tools of a philosopher is the distinction. 

A distinction, whether made by a philosopher or not, is a method of demarcating concepts and guarding against conflation and confusion. For example, when I say that there is a fundamental difference between statements like “that Spanish woman is dancing” and “you should dance with that Spanish woman”, I make a distinction. 

The difference between these statements or the reason for this difference is among the things I am trying to get at with my distinction. For example, in this case, I have drawn a distinction between these two sorts of statements in order to suggest that there are at least two kinds of statements in the world and that they have different natures, functions, or purposes. The first statement is descriptive, in that it is describing matters of fact in a neutral way; while the other is prescriptive (or normative), in that it attempts to guide action and present some form of an idea or norm — i.e. what we should do. 

Without becoming distracted by the example, I will simply say that in drawing distinctions we are trying to discover something beyond the concepts — something fundamental to the world. The idea is that this distinction within our language reveals something deeper about our world. 

A failure to make good distinctions, it has often been thought, leads to confusion. Take as another example these two passages from the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein writes,

“3.323 In the language of everyday life it very often happens that the same word signifies in two different ways—and therefore belongs to two different symbols—or that two words, which signify in different ways, are apparently applied in the same way in the proposition. Thus the word “is” appears as the copula, as the sign of equality, and as the expression of existence; “to exist” as an intransitive verb like “to go”; “identical” as an adjective; we speak of something but also of the fact of something happening. (In the proposition “Green is green”—where the first word is a proper name and the last an adjective—these words have not merely different meanings but they are different symbols.)

3.324 Thus there easily arise the most fundamental confusions (of which the whole of philosophy is full).”

Here Wittgenstein, among other things, points out that there are at least three distinct ways in which the word “is” can function. 

(1) As the copula — as that which links subject and predicate like “The man is tall”. 

(2) As the sign of equality, as in “2 plus 2 is 4”. 

(3) As the sign of existence, as in “I am that I am”.

These are good distinctions, and some of the most perplexing philosophical puzzles have arguably been generated by failing to make them. One such example is, according to Kant, the confusion within Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God. Many years later, Quine had much to say on how we ought to use the word “is” in order to avoid confusion. 

I still believe in Philosophy, and I employ such distinctions in this philosophical manner; but I, just like the later Wittgenstein, have fears that such distinctions are far-too limited by the language in which they appear and that nothing fundamental is really being signaled at. I have the creeping fear that we are just blabbing on about our own language and nothing more; which would reduce philosophy to, as Russell said, “at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table amusement.”

To see where this worry comes from, consider the following philosopher, let’s call him Saaz, who wants to suggest something about the human personality by drawing a distinction between the expressions “to like” and “to love”. 

To Saaz, there is something expressed about the human personality by our separating these concepts of “love” and “like”(what he is aiming at is here an irrelevancy). But now imagine Saaz drawing this distinction in the presence of a native Spanish speaker. 

In Spanish, they use (among others) the words “gustar”, “querer”, and “amar” all to signify a form of romantic attraction. The meanings of these verbs can be loosely mapped onto English equivalents (“gustar” = like, “querer” = second-degree love, and “amar” = first-degree love), but they are simply not the same, and this “distinction” that Saaz draws between “like” and “love” would make little to no sense in Spanish, where the “distinction” would be, at least, between three verbs and not of the same sort.

How can a distinction be used to learn something about our world if it is so limited by the language itself? 

This fear — that all of our subtle argumentative and philosophical maneuvers merely reveal things about the way we use our language — continues to terrify me.

The importance of language is philosophy is certainly not subject to question. The question is: how far does this importance go? How much of what we are doing is real, and how much is just verbal gymnastics with no prize at the end?

Returning to our first example, can we really make the distinction between “normativity” and “description”? Is such a distinction fundamental to the world or merely an expression of our language? 

At this point, I remain uncertain of the implications of this linguistic reduction of our critical thinking. It could be true that there is a way to circumvent the powerful barriers of language; or, it could be true, with the most extreme implications, that

5.6 Los límites de mi lenguaje son los límites de mi mundo

 

Following in the spirit of my last post, I want to ruminate on one aspect of modernity and its place in our lives: streaming entertainment services.

---

Do you remember the feeling you had when you were listening to the radio and a song you loved came on? Perhaps you were hoping for it and the moment felt like a touch of fate, or perhaps you were not expecting it and the pleasant surprise brightened your day. 

Nowadays, however, most people do not experience music in this way. There is so much more control. People, myself included, select the songs they want to hear from an endless supply of music courtesy of youtube or various streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music. At best, they make a large playlist and just let the playlist run its course (although even this semi-controlled state is a stretch for most people). 

I ask you to think right now of the feeling you get when you are thumbing through song-after-song in your Spotify library, trying to find that perfect song for the 10-minute trip you are making; and for some odd reason, nothing sounds good. You click and click until something is good enough. What is happening? You have all the songs in the world at your fingertips, and yet you can’t find one you like, and when you do find it, you are thinking of what you want to play next after only a few minutes of listening, and you often switch the song before it’s even over. 

Consider also movies and television. Do you remember the feeling of going to rent movies from Blockbuster? Or the feeling of flipping through the channels and seeing a movie on that surprised you? Or, an even more distant notion, do you remember watching your regularly scheduled television series with your family? All of these experiences are a far ways off from our current solo-binge-watching Netflix culture, where one of the most common questions people ask each other is what shows are you watching right now?

Think also of that feeling you get when you are doing a Netflix night with your friends, but the plan was to select the movie together. How much time do you spend searching? How long until all the movies and shows just look somewhat uninviting and bland? For me, the ennui from this experience is so familiar. 

Similar parallels can be drawn to a variety of other services (porn, Amazon, the immediacy of google searches, food delivery, etc, but I will leave those to your reflections.) 

The key point that I want to make is that in chiefly these two realms of media — music and visual entertainment — we have sacrificed community, serendipity, and delayed gratification for isolation, control, and immediacy. And I think there is something sad about this, and that we ought to do what we can to prevent the wholesale loss of these qualities. 

Before I go any further, however, I want to anticipate an objection. 

Golden-Age-Bias: 

“But Aidan, you are engaged in Golden Age Thinking. You are pining after a past that is dead and viewing it with rose-tinted glasses. Everyone thinks the old times are the best, and you need to recognize your bias.”

To which I respond that this is a good point, but it does not apply to me here and now. 

Golden-Age-Thinking is very real, and I (like everyone) certainly have such a bias. However, all this bias demands of me is that I reflect carefully about my opinions in light of this, and that I exercise my cognitive abilities as best I can in order to correct for it. It does not mean that I am wrong — that would be to have an opposite bias, just as harmful, that nothing can ever get worse. I’ll call it the Gospel of Progress Bias.

Gospel of Progress Bias:

Some people tend to think that any change is necessarily for the better, and that nothing was ever better in its former state than it is now. This, obviously, is just as silly as the former view (that everything was better in the past). Imagine telling someone that their life wasn’t better when they didn’t have pancreatic cancer. Sometimes, changes are for the worse, and to deny this fact is irrational. For some people, I believe that the bias toward progress is far more active and influential than the former bias toward the past.

And particularly in the case of streaming entertainment services, I believe that the Gospel of Progress Bias is clouding more people’s judgments than the Golden Age Bias.

Furthermore, I don’t believe I am engaged in Golden-Age Thinking, because I use Spotify, Netflix, and I don’t want Blockbuster to come back into business. The world has changed, and there are many things that I love about these changes. But we must not let these changes morph us into some way of living which does not suit us in the deepest sense; we must make these technologies work for us in a way that will maximize our flourishing and our virtue as human beings with human hearts and human needs. We must demand, as E.F. Schumacher puts it, “technology with a human face”. 

I think when we look closely at our relationship with these streaming services, we can see that there is something amiss.

And this is where my key point arises:

More control and more freedom over these goods are not necessarily good, when the purpose of the very thing we are controlling (to entertain us) is, in the long run, not being achieved as well as it could be! This things are entertaining us and fulfilling us less than they would if, when considering how to use them, we adhered to other virtues like resignation, serendipity, and, yes, sometimes boredom. It is okay to be bored.

Ultimately, what I believe is happening is the ever-growing process of desensitization that we are undergoing in light of the technological changes of modernity. Our needs are expanding, and we want louder, bigger, shinier things, and we want all of them when we want them and where we want them. 

Compare this to the man from my previous post, who saw a comet in Boston in 1662 — what wonder he would have felt. Compare this to the feeling of taking a shower after a day of hard work. Compare this to listening to an album, in its entirety, that you stumbled across at a store and decided to buy. Is it really better to constantly be expanding our needs and engorging our desires?

But, the question remains, how can we resist this desensitization without giving up the objective benefits of these advances?  How can we resensitize ourselves to the life that we, as human beings, are meant to live?

One thing that comes to mind is a changed relationship to boredom. But, in all honesty, I’m still working on this part. However, even by recognizing this problem and the need for a solution we have made progress. And this, I think, is progress of the real kind — a progression toward something higher and more worthy.

-AW