Review: Naming and Necessity

Naming and Necessity by Saul A. Kripke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It’s wrong. You may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place; but I hope not, because I’m sure it’s wrong too if it is a theory.

Like many other works of philosophy (and those of other subjects, for that matter), Naming and Necessity will likely be perplexing if you do not know what the author is arguing against. At the time that Kripke gave these lectures, the dominant theory in the philosophy of language was the Frege-Russell theory of reference. It is a rather elegant and simple theory, and you can look up Russell’s famous paper, “On Denoting,” or Quine’s “On What There Is,” online if you would like to know more about it. But I will explain it briefly.

Essentially, the idea is that names are shorthand descriptions. Thus, if you say “there’s a tiger over there!” you’re really saying something like “there is an x over there, such that x is feline, yellow-brown, black striped, quadrupedal, solitary, bigger than a human,” and so on. This way of analyzing names was, I believe, partly adopted because it carried no ontological commitment. It avoids confusing situations, like when you have to say “wizards don’t exist!”—for how could you name the things (wizards) that do not exist? That is paradoxical. On the Frege-Russell view, this awkwardness is avoided, since, when you assert that wizards do not exist, you are really saying “there is no x such that x is humanoid, magical, bearded, robed,” and so on. Thus, by specifying the criteria, lots of annoying existential questions can be side-stepped.

Nevertheless, I think that most people, when they first learn of this theory, feel a bit uncomfortable with it. The theory just is not intuitive. I do not think that anything analogous to Russell’s analyses are going on in my head when I hear “there’s a tiger over there!” In other words, I do not think of tigers as bundles of qualities or clusters of descriptions, but that the relationship of the name “tiger” to the living, breathing animals is much more straightforward. Kripke is essentially arguing that our intuition is correct. In fact, it is Kripke’s express point to uphold our intuitions regarding names:

Of course, some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.

Seeing as Kripke is not fond of theories (as the opening quote shows) and is quite fond of intuition, this puts him into a bit of a pickle, for how is he supposed to argue against the theory? Thus, most of Kripke’s arguments rely on bizarre counterfactuals, which he expresses using the language of “possible worlds.” (I understood this as merely a way of speaking about hypothetical or counterfactual statements, rather than any metaphysical doctrine about possibility and parallel worlds; and this way of speaking, when understood as a figure of speech, does convey the essential point rather well.)

To explain Kripke’s argument, let me come up with a bizarre counterfactual of my own. Suppose that someone (presumably with far too much time and money on their hands, and with a questionable sensitivity to animal rights) decided to take some lions from Africa and introduce them into Asia. Then, suppose this person decided to shave the lions’ manes, to paint them yellow-brown, and then to paint black stripes on them, so as to look just like tigers. Suppose he is even such a genius animal trainer that he trains these lions to behave indistinguishably from tigers.

Now we return to the above example. If “there’s a tiger over there!” really meant “there is an x over there, such that x is feline, yellow-brown, black striped, quadrupedal, solitary, bigger than a human,” then the statement would be perfectly true, even if the person were pointing to the painted lions.

But it is not true. Lions and tigers are what could be called ‘natural types’; and natural types are distinguished by some essential quality, not by their total descriptions. Kripke is really reviving the old notion of essentialism: names pick out the object that possesses the essential property associated with that name. In the case of lions and tigers, I suppose the essential quality would be their genotypes. Thus, the essential property of a type of thing need not be the qualities by which we normally identify the thing. We normally identify lions and tigers by the way they look and act, but the above example shows that even those qualities are contingent; it is their respective essences (their genotypes in this case) which are the necessary qualities of tigers and lions.

This leads Kripke to disagree with another engrained philosophical idea (the second N of the title): that ‘necessary’ and ‘a priori‘ are synonyms. It was thought that only necessary truths could be known a priori, and only a priori truths were necessary. (In other words, you could only be certain about things you knew independently of experience.) Thus, “all bachelors are unmarried” is, in this view, a necessary truth, even if there are no bachelors at all, simply because that is the definition of ‘bachelor’; it is an analytic statement, true by definition, a mere tautology, and thus can be known a priori. This restriction of necessary statements to trivial tautologies was, I think, a way of fighting against obscure metaphysical arguments, such as the ontological argument for the existence of God.

Kripke, as I said, disagrees with this line of thinking. For Kripke, things can be known a priori that are not necessary, and things can be necessary and learned empirically (or a posteriori). The case of the genotypes of lions and tigers is a case in point; it took a long time to discover DNA, and to create the tools needed to investigate it in depth. DNA was, in other words, obviously learned of empirically. Nevertheless, it is a necessary truth that lions have the lion essence (genotype), and tigers have the tiger essence (genotype)—because if they did not they would not be lions and tigers. Necessary truths, then, need not be known a priori. (In other words, you can be certain about some things you learn from experience.)

The reverse distinction can also be made. If I pick up a certain stick, and say “I shall use this as the standard for my new measure, the schmeter,” I can know a priori that whatever length the stick is (in, say, inches or meters), it is exactly one schmeter. However, the exact length of a schmeter is contingent on the stick, and we can imagine situations in which the stick was longer or shorter, so the exact meaning of this a priori knowledge is contingent on some state of affairs. To sum up Kripke’s distinction: ‘necessary’ is a metaphysical term having to do with the essence of something, while ‘a priori‘ is an epistemological term having to do with how we come to know something.

As I hope you can see from my summary, Kripke’s arguments are meant to be intuitive; he rejects certain philosophical ideas by just pointing to situations in which they fail to properly apply. This, I think, is why Naming and Necessity is so well known: one need not master some technical apparatus, but merely think through the consequences of some hypothetical scenarios. Certainly, this is not a perfect book. Kripke is wordy and repetitive; this already short book could probably have been much shorter and crisper, or could have at least covered more territory. Still, Kripke was arguing against a whole paradigm; and paradigms do not go gentle into that good night.

When I finished this book, I was fairly convinced; but as subsequent conversations (in Wastrel’s comments, for example)* have shown me, there are some awfully strong counter-arguments. Philosophical questions are never so easily resolved. In particular, I am curious to see how Kripke proposes to deal with some of the situations which motivated the creation of the descriptive theory of names in the first place—for example, statements like “wizards aren’t real.” How can there be a causal connection with something that does not exist? And how can the name refer to a natural type of a fictitious object? After all, facts are easy to talk about; fiction is another thing entirely.

*See my Goodreads review to read Wastrel’s penetrating criticisms of Kripke.

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Review: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like many on Goodreads, I decided to read this book because of Manny’s enthusiastic review. And I am glad I did. As a teacher of English as a foreign language, it seemed high time that I understand something of the language’s history. This book was an excellent choice, since it focused on that aspect of English most pesky to foreign speakers—grammar—while avoiding the too-often-told story of the growth of English vocabulary via French and Latin.

McWhorter begins by focusing on two distinctive features of English grammar: the so-called ‘meaningless’ do (as in, “Do you eat rabbits?”) and the use of the progressive in order to talk about the present (as in, “I am going,” rather than simply “I go”). Not coincidentally, these two aspect of English cause some of the most persistent errors in my students. In Spanish, just like in every other European language I know, there is no auxiliary verb needed for negations or questions; you can simply ask “¿Comes conejos?” Similarly, in Spanish, as in German or French, you can use the simple present to refer to what you are doing now; thus, a Spaniard can say “Voy” to express a current movement, and they reserve “Estoy yendo” for special emphasis.

Curiously, no other Germanic languages have these features. Indeed, they are absent (according to McWhorter) from every other European language, with the notable exception of the Celtic languages (specifically, Welsh and Cornish). This leads him to the quite natural supposition that the indigenous Celtic languages exerted an influence on the Old English spoken by the invading Anglo-Saxons. He musters quite a number of evidences and arguments in support of this thesis, to the extent that I was pretty worn out by the end of the chapter.

To be fair, this idea is considered quite controversial in the academic community, so McWhorter felt the need to champion it in full battle array. Nevertheless I think the maxim “Know your audience” applies here. I presume most readers of this book will be, like me, non-specialists, with little reason to be skeptical of the Celtic influence; to the contrary, it struck me as extremely plausible. So McWhorter’s harping on the point was simply taxing. In any case, if he is looking to influence the academic community, a short popular book is not the medium to do it.

McWhorter’s next chapter deals with the Viking influence, which he holds responsible for the jettisoning of much of Old English’s serpentine Germanic grammar, resulting in the relatively “easy” language we have today. And he rounds out the book by making the considerably more speculative argument that Proto-Germanic diverged in such a distinctive way from Proto-Indo-European because a large number of Semitic speakers (Phoenicians who had made it to Denmark) learned the language. At this point, I admit that I began to have reservations about McWhorter’s method. Despite the reasonableness of the Celtic-English and the Scandinavian-English hypotheses, the cumulative effects of McWhorter’s arguments was to weaken each.

McWhorter’s specialty is researching how languages influenced one another historically; and one begins to suspect that this academic orientation leads him to see evidence for this phenomenon everywhere. To me it is unsatisfying to write a history of English as a series of stories, however plausible, of how it was influenced by other languages. This is because, logically, in order for there to be distinct languages capable of mixing there must first be languages capable of transforming without any linguistic contact. It can all begin to sound like a biologist who insists that the reason elephants have tusks is because proto-elephants mated with proto-walruses epochs ago.

This is an unfair comparison, of course; and to repeat I think his Celtic argument is quite strong. However, the more one reads, the more McWhorter’s method can begin to sound unsettlingly like Just-So stories. Some inconsistencies in the arguments make this clear. For example, he brushes aside the paucity of Celtic vocabulary in English, while citing the many Scandinavian loan-words as evidence for Viking influence (not to mention the possible Semitic loan-words in Proto-Germanic). To me it seems prima facie dubious that Welsh and Cornish speakers were able to fundamentally transform English’s grammar without leaving a considerable stockpile of loanwords. Importing words is the most natural thing in the world when learning a foreign language; I do it all the time, as do my students.

To objections like these McWhorter is always able to point to a case where a similar event occurred as the scenario he is describing. But, again, one surmises that the corpus of available examples is large enough to back up any claim he wishes to impose. McWhorter criticizes other linguists for ignoring the causes of language change. But is invoking the influence of other languages a satisfying explanation? To me this is of the same order as arguing that life on Earth originally came from Mars. Perhaps, but how does life arise in the first place?

Now, it may be unfair of me to nitpick what is, after all, a popular book. But if McWhorter saw fit to include so much argument in favor of his uncommonly-held opinions, I think it behooves readers to be somewhat skeptical, especially since the general reader has no specialized knowledge to ground her acceptance or rejection of McWhorter’s conclusions. For my part, I think a more expository and less polemical book on the history of English would have made for far more pleasing reading. Yet McWhorter is an engaging writer and an original thinker, so it was valuable to learn of his approach to linguistics.

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Quotes & Commentary #46: Wittgenstein

If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

I often think about the relationship between the public and the private. As a naturally introverted person, I feel very keenly the separation of my own experience from the rest of reality. I make music, take pictures, and write this blog as a way of communicating this inner reality—of manifesting my private world in a publically consumable form.

Having an ‘inner world’ is one of the basic facts of life. Each of us is aware that there is a part of us—the most vital and most mysterious part, perhaps—that is inaccessible to others; we can keep secrets, we can make judgments without anyone else noticing, we can have private pleasures and pains. All of our experience takes place in this space; the only world we ever see, hear, or touch is in our heads.

And yet we are also aware that this reality is, in a sense, insubstantial and ultimately secondary. Our inner world exists in reference to the outer world, the world of objective facts, the world that is publically known. My senses are not just mental facts, but point outward; my thoughts, actions, and desires are oriented towards a world that does not exist in me. Rather, I exist in it, and my experience is just one interpretation of this world, and one vantage point from which to view it.

How are these two worlds related? How do they interact? Is one more important? What is the relationship of our private minds to our public bodies? These are classic philosophical conundrums, mysterious still after all these millennia.

Historical philosophers aside, most of us, in our more reflective moments, become acutely aware of the division between subjective and objective. When you are, for example, searching for a word—when a word is on the tip of your tongue—you feel as though you are rummaging through your own mind. The word is in you somewhere, and nobody but you can find it.

From this, and other experiences like it, we get the feeling that speaking (and by extension, writing) consists of taking something internal and externalizing it. Language is, in this view, an expression of thought; and words take their significance from cogitations. That is to say, our private mental world is the wellspring of significance; our minds imbue our language with meaning. The word “pizza,” for example, means pizza because I am thinking of pizza when I say it.

And yet, as Wittgenstein tried to show in his later philosophy, this is not how language really works. To the contrary, words are defined by their social use: what they accomplish in social situations. In other words, language is public. The meaning of words is determined, not by referring to any inner thought, nor by referring to any objective facts, but by convention, in a community of speakers. (I don’t have the space here to recapitulate his arguments; but you can see my review of his book here.) The word “pizza” means pizza because you can use it to order in a restaurant.

This may seem to be a merely academic matter; but when you begin to think of meaning as determined socially rather than psychologically, then you realize that your cognitive apparatus is not nearly as private as you are wont to believe. In order to communicate thought, you must transform it into something socially consumable: language. All of our vague notions must be put into boxes, whose dimensions are determined by the community, not by us.

But the social does not only intrude when we try to communicate with others; we also understand ourselves through these same social concepts. That is to say, insofar as we think in words, and we understand our own personalities through language, we are subjecting our deepest selves to public categories; even in our most private moments, we are seeing ourselves in the light of the community. We are social beings to our very core.

This does not only extend to the definitions of words. As Wittgenstein points out, to use language effectively, we must also judge like the community.

Any word, however well-defined, is ambiguous in its application. To apply the word “car” to a vehicle, for example, requires not only that I know the definition—whatever that may be—but that I learn how to differentiate between a car, a truck, a van, and an SUV. Every member of a community is involved in educating one another’s judgment, and keeping their opinions in tune. If I call an SUV a “car,” or a pickup truck a “van,” any fellow speakers will correct me, and in this way they will educate me to judge like a member of the community.

As I learn Spanish, I have firsthand experience of this. To pick a trivial example, English word “sausage” is more broad than any corresponding Spanish word. Here in Spain they differentiate between salchicha and salchichón, a difference that my American mind has a hard time understanding. Although Spaniards have tried to define this difference to me, I have found that the only way for me to learn it is by being corrected every time I apply the wrong word.

More significantly, in order to conjugate properly in Spanish, I must not only learn how to change the ending and so forth, but I must learn when it is appropriate to use each tense. To pick the most troubling example, in English we have only the simple past, whereas in Spanish there is both the imperfecto and the indefinido. I constantly use the wrong form, not because I don’t know their technical usage (it has been explained to me countless times, using various metaphors and examples, and I can recite this technical definition from memory), but because my judgment is out of alignment.

Whether an action is continuous, periodic, completed, ongoing, or occasional—this is not as self-apparent as every native-speaker likes to assume, but indeed requires a good deal of interpretation. My judgment has not yet been properly educated by the community, and so, despite my knowing the technical usage of these two forms, I still misuse them.

In a way, this aspect of language learning is somewhat chilling. In order to speak effectively, not only must I use communal vessels to contain my thoughts, but I must learn to judge along the same lines as other members of the community—to interpret, analyze, and distinguish like them. What is left of our private selves when we subtract everything shaped and put there by the community? Am I a self-existent person, or just a reflection of my social milieu?

Yet I do not think that all this is something to dread. Having communally defined categories, and a communally shaped judgment, gives permanence and exactitude to communication. Left on our own, thinking without symbols, communicating with no one but ourselves, there is nothing that grants stability to our reflections; they constantly slip through our fingers, an ever-changing flux tied to nothing. With no fixed points, our judgment flounders in a torrent of ideas, thrashing ineffectually.

When we learn a language, and learn to use it well, we learn how to pour the ambiguous stuff of thought into stable vessels, how to cast the molten metal of our mental life into solid forms. This way, not only can we understand the world better, but we can learn to understand ourselves better. This, I think, is the very purpose of culture itself: to partition reality into sections, to impose structure on ambiguous reality.

Let me give you a common example.

A relationship is a naturally ambiguous thing. The affection and commitment that two people feel for one another exists on a spectrum. And often we do not really know how committed we are to somebody until we examine the relationship in retrospect. And yet, relationships must be defined, and defined early-on, for the sake of the community.

Every culture on earth has rituals and categories associated with courtship, for the simple fact that somebody’s relationship status is a big part of their social identity. Ambiguities in social identity are not tolerated, because they impede normal social life; to deal with somebody effectively, you need them to have a recognizable social status, a status they tells you what to expect from them and what you can ask of them and a million other things.

In modern culture, as we delay marriage ever-more into the distant horizon, we have developed the need for new relationship categories. Now we are “dating,” and then “in a relationship.” The status of being “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” is now socially understood and approved as one level of commitment.

The interesting thing, to me, is that the decision to be in a relationship, to become boyfriend and girlfriend (or whatever the case may be), seems like a private decision, affecting only two people. And yet, it is really a decision for the benefit of the community. To be in a relationship defines where you stand in relation to everyone else: whether it is appropriate to flirt with you, to ask you out, to dance with you, to ask about your significant other, and so forth.

Now, this is not to say that the decision is solely for the benefit for the community. To put this another way, this also benefits you and your partner, because you are also part of the community. It puts a publicly understood category, indicating a certain level of commitment, on your naturally ambiguous and shifting feelings. In other words, by applying a public category to a private feeling, you are, in effect, imposing a certain level of stability on the feeling.

Look what happens next. This level of commitment, being publically labeled, is also bolstered. Friends, family, and coworkers treat you differently. You are now in a different category. And this response of the community helps to form and reinforce your private feelings of commitment. Relationships are never wholly private affairs between two people. It takes a village to make a couple.

Again, I am not suggesting that this is a bad thing. To the contrary, I think that having communal definitions is what allows us to understand our own selves at all. This is also why I write these quotes and commentary. By forcing myself to take my ambiguous thoughts and put them into words, into public vessels, not only do I communicate with others, but I find out what I myself think.

Quotes & Commentary #32: Flaubert

Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

—Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

What is language?

Language is a symbolic medium of communication, connecting two immaterial minds through vibrating air.

Language is a chain of crisscrossing lines and circles on a screen, laden with meaning.

A residue of history, language is the appendage with which the human imagination gropes in baffled astonishment to understand its world.

Language is a cry of joy, a gasp of pain, a grumble of discontent, a sigh of lonely misery, a howl in the night. It is a catalogue of regrets, a repository of wit, an archive of longing; it is an asylum of echoes and ghosts. Communal wisdom and folly immemorial, it is a bundle of superstitious sayings, animated with old pains and aflame with arthritic aches.

Language is shabby. Faint whiffs of dust lurk in its crooks and creases. Old stains are folded into its crumpled, crimped, cramped fabric.

As opaque as ink and as clear as air, our language is a chronicle of errors and our only avenue to the truth.

Language is the vessel of our secrets, as intimate as our dreams and yet as impersonal as the weather. The bedrock of human life, and yet as temporary as a puff of smoke and as insubstantial as a speck of snow. Dying away and born again every second, as malleable as vapor and as durable as time itself.

Possessed by all and yet owned by none, language is the voice of our ancestors speaking through us.

Language is a home we carry around in our heads. Caressed, cherished, and treasured like an old teddy bear. Recklessly renovated, refurbished, and redecorated like a basement apartment.

Controlled, manipulated, distorted, twisted, bent, squeezed, throttled, and maimed, over and over again, language is universally betrayed. But we are all betrayed in return, for language always deserts us in our hour of most desperate need, leaving us stumbling, stammering, mouthing jumbled nonsense, and finally—silent.

On the Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of it all? What is the purpose of life, the universe, and everything?

Most thinking people, I suspect, ask themselves this at least once in their life. Some get rather obsessed by it, becoming existentialists or religious enthusiasts. But most of us deal with this question in a more foolproof way: by ignoring it. Indeed, when you’re enjoying yourself, this question—“What is the meaning of life?”—seems rather silly. It is usually when we feel depressed, anxious, frightened, nervous, or vulnerable that it arises to our minds, often with tremendous force.

I do not wish to delve too deeply into dubious psychoanalyzing as regards the motivation for asking this question. But it is worthwhile noting down why we so persistently ask it—or at least, the reasons why I have asked it. Most obviously, it is a response to the awareness of our own mortality. We are all going to die someday; our whole existence will come to an end; and this is terrifying. We can attempt to comfort ourselves with the thought that we will be remembered or that our children (if we have any) will perpetuate our line. Yet this is an empty form of immortality, not only because we aren’t around to appreciate it, but also because, however long our memory or our descendents last, they too will come to an end. All of humanity will end one day; that’s certain.

The famous “Death of God” (the decline of religion) in western history caused a similar crisis. If there was no God directing the universe and ordaining what is right and what is wrong; if there was no afterlife but only a black emptiness waiting for us—what was the point? Nihilism seemed to many to be inescapable. Existentialism grew up in this environment, which inherited many of the assumptions of Christianity while (for the most part) rejecting God Himself, which led to not a few tortured, tangled systems of thought that attempted to reconcile atheism with some of our more traditional assumptions about right and wrong and what it means to live a meaningful life.

I had fallen into this same trap by asking myself the question: “If everything will end someday and humans are only a small part of the universe, what is the point?” This question is very revealing, for it exposes some of the assumptions that, upon further reflection, don’t hold water. First, why is something more worthwhile if it lasts longer? Why do we need to imagine an eternal God and an eternal afterlife to feel secure in our meaningfulness? Do people who live to eighty have more of a meaningful life than those who make it to thirty? Put this way, it seems to be a rather dubious assumption. For my part, I can’t figure out what permanence has to do with meaning. And by the way, I also don’t think that the opposite idea—that life is meaningful because it is temporary—is more useful, even though it is a poetic sentiment.

I think all this talk about permanence and impermanence does not get to the essence of the word “meaning.” What is more, it is my opinion that, once we properly analyze this word “meaning,” we will see that this fateful question—“What is the meaning of life?”—will vanish before our eyes. And this is not because life has no meaning, but because the question is based on a false premise.

To begin, let us figure out what the word “meaningful” actually means. To do this, take something that we can all agree has meaning: language. Language is in fact the paragon of meaningfulness; it is a symbolic system by which we communicate. If words and sentences had no meaning, you would have no idea what I’m saying right now. But where does the meaning of a sentence lie? This is the question.

To answer this question, let me ask another: If every human perished in a cataclysmic event, would any of the writing that we left behind have meaning? Would the libraries and book stores, the shop signs and magazines, the instruction manuals and wine labels—would they have meaning? I think they would not.

We don’t even have to engage in a hypothetical here. Consider the Indus Script, a form of writing developed in ancient India that has yet to be deciphered. Researchers are now in the process of figuring out how to read the stone tablets. How should they go about doing so? They can weigh each of the tablets to figure out their mass; they can measure the average height and thickness of the lines; they can perform a chemical analysis. Would that help? Of course not. And this is for the obvious reason that the meaning of a tablet is not a physical property of an object. Rather, the meaning of the script lies wholly in our ability to respond appropriately to it. The meaning of the words exists in our experience of the tablets and our behavior related to the tablets, and is not a property of the tablets themselves.

I must pause here to address a philosophical pickle. It is an interesting debate whether the meaning of language exists in the minds of language-users (e.g. meaning is psychological) or in the behavior of language-users (e.g. meaning is social). This dichotomy might also be expressed by asking whether meaning is private or public. For my part, I think that there is a continuum of meaningfulness from private thoughts to public behavior, and in any case the question is immaterial to the argument of this essay. What matters is that meaning is a property of human experience. Meaning is not a property of objects, but is a property of how humans experience, think about, and behave toward objects. That’s the important point.

The reason the Indus Script is meaningless to us is therefore because it doesn’t elicit from us any consistent pattern of thoughts or actions. (Okay, well that’s not entirely true, since we do consistently think about and treat the tablets as if they were ancient artifacts bearing a mysterious script, but you get my point.)

By contrast, many things besides language do elicit from us a consistent pattern of thoughts and actions. Most people, for example, tend to respond to and think about chairs in a characteristic way. This is why we say that we know what chairs are for. The social purpose of chairs is what defines them—not their height, weight, design, material, or any other property of the chairs themselves—and this social purpose exists in us, in our behaviors and thoughts. If everyone on earth were brainwashed and told to think about these same objects as weapons instead of for sitting then chairs would have a different meaning for us.

Ultimately, I think that meaning is just an interpretation of our senses. A camera pointed at a chair will record the same light waves that are being emitted from the chair as I will; but only I will interpret this data to mean chair. You might even say that meaning is what a camera or any other recording device fails to record, since the devices can only record physical properties. Thus meaning, in the sense that I’m using the word, depends on an interpreting mind. Meaning exists for us.

I hope I’m not belaboring this point, but it seems to be worth a little belaboring since it is precisely this point people forget when they ask “What is the meaning of life?” Assuming that most people mean “human life” when they ask this question, then we are led to the conclusion that this question is unanswerable. Human life itself—as a biological fact—has no meaning, since no fact in itself has meaning. In itself, “human life” has no point in the same way that the moon or saw dust has no point. But our experience of human life certainly does. In fact, by definition the human experience comprises every conceivable meaning. All experience is one endless tapestry of significance.

I see this keyboard below my fingers and understand what it is for; I see a chair to my right and I understand its purpose. I see a candle flickering in front of me and I find it pretty and I like its smell. Every single one of these little experiences is brimming with meaning. In fact, I would go further. I think it is simply impossible for an intelligent creature to have a single experience that doesn’t have meaning. Every time you look at something and you understand what it is, the experience is shot through with meaning. Every time you find something interesting, pretty, repulsive, curious, frightening, attractive, these judgments are the very stuff of meaning. Every time you hear a sentence or a musical phrase, every time you enjoy a sunset or find something tasty—the whole fabric of your life, every second you experience, is inevitably meaningful.

This brings me to an important moral point. Humans are the locus of meaning. Our conscious experience is where meaning resides. Consciousness is not simply a reflection of the world, but an interpretation of the world; and interpretations are not the sorts of things that can be right or wrong. Interpretations can only be popular and unpopular.

For example, if you “misunderstand” a sentence, this only means that most people would tend to disagree with you about it. In the case of language, which is a necessarily strict system, we tend to say that you are “wrong” if your interpretation is unpopular, because unless people respond to words and sentences very consistently language can’t perform its proper function. “Proper” meaning is therefore enforced by language users; but the meaning is not inherent in the words and sentences themselves. But in the example of a very abstract painting, then we tend not to care so much whether people interpret the painting in the same way, since the painting is meant to illicit aesthetic sensations and not transmit specific information. (In practice, this is all we mean by the terms “objective” and “subjective”—namely, that the former is used for things most people agree on while the latter is used for things that many people disagree on. Phrased another way, objective meanings are those to which people respond consistently, while subjective meanings are those to which people respond inconsistently.)

This is why meaning is inescapably personal, since experience is personal. Nobody can interpret your experience but yourself. It’s simply impossible. Thus conscious individuals cannot be given a purpose from the “outside” in the same way that, for example, a chair can. The purpose of chairs is simply how we behave toward and think about chairs; it is a meaning imposed by us onto a certain class of objects. But this process does not work if we try to impose a meaning onto a conscious being, since that being experiences their own meaning. If, for example, everybody in the world treated a man as if his purpose were to be a comedian, and he thought his purpose was to be a painter, he wouldn’t be wrong. His interpretation of his own life might be unpopular, but it can never be incorrect.

Human life, either individually or in general, cannot be given a value. You cannot measure the worth of a life in money, friends, fame, goodness, or anything else. Valuations are only valid in a community of individuals who treat them as such. Money, for example, is only effective currency because that’s how we behave towards it. Money has value, not in itself, but for us. But a person does not only have value in the eyes of their community, but in their own eyes, and this value cannot be overridden or delegitimized. And since your experience is, by definition, the only thing you experience, if you experience yourself as valuable nobody else’s opinion can contradict that. A person despised by all the world is not worthless if she still respects herself.

In principle (though not in practice) meaning is not democratic. If everybody in the world but one thought that the point of life was to be good, and a single person thought that the point of life was to be happy, there would be no way to prove that this person was wrong. It is true, in practice people whose interpretations of the world differ from those of their community are usually put into line by an exercise of power. An Inquisition might, for example, prosecute and torture everybody that disagrees with them. Either this, or a particular interpretation imposes itself because, if an individual chooses to think differently, then they are unable to function in the community. Thus if I behaved towards money as if it was tissue paper, my resultant poverty would make me question this interpretation pretty quickly. But it’s important to remember that a king’s opinion of coleslaw isn’t worth any more than a cook’s, and even though everyone thinks dollar bills are valuable it doesn’t change the fact that they’re made of cotton. Power and practicality do not equal truth.

Thus we find that human life doesn’t have meaning, but human experience does; and this meaning changes from individual to individual, from moment to moment. This meaning has nothing to do with whether life is permanent or impermanent. It exists now. It has nothing to do with whether humans are the center of the universe or only a small part of it. The meaning exists for us. We don’t need to be the center of a divine plan to have meaningful lives. Nor is nihilism justified, since the fact that we are small and temporary creatures does not undermine our experience. Consider: every chair will eventually be destroyed. Yet we don’t agonize about the point of making chairs, since it isn’t important whether the chairs are part of a divine plan or will remain forever; the chairs are part of our plan and are useful now. Replace “chairs” with “our lives” and you’ve hit the truth.

You might say now that I’m missing the point entirely. I am interpreting the word “meaning” too generally, in the sense that I am including any kind of conscious interpretation or significance, explicit or implicit, public or private. When most people ask about the meaning of life, they mean something “higher,” something more profound, more noble, more deep. Fair enough.

Of course I can’t hope to solve this problem for you. But I will say that, since meaning resides in experience, and since all experience is personal, you cannot hope to solve the meaning of all human life. The best you can hope for is to find meaning—“higher” meaning—in your own experience. In fact, it is simply presumptuous and absurd to say “This is the meaning of human life,” since you can’t very well crawl into another person’s head and interpret their experiences for them, much less crawl into the heads of all of humanity. And in fact you should be happy for this, I think, because it means that your value can never be adequately measured by another person and that any exterior criterion that someone attempts to apply to you cannot delegitimize your own experience. But also remember that the same also applies to your attempts to measure others.

I will also add, just as my personal advice, that when you realize that meaning only exists in the present moment, since meaning only exists in your experience, much of the existential angst will disappear. Find the significance and beauty of what’s in front of your eyes. Life is only a succession of moments, and the more moments you appreciate the more you’ll get out of life. Don’t worry about how you measure up against any external standard, whether it be wealth, fame, respectability, love, or anything else; the meaning of your own life resides in you. And the meaning of your life not one thing, but the ever-changing flux of experience that comprises your reality.

Lotz in Translation

Saving the world—one long, pretentious blog post at a time.

Tag: Language