I’m having an interesting email exchange with a colleague about life and love, etc. We I seem to be converging on reiterating the idea that often it doesn’t make sense to ask if a concept exists but rather what properties someone’s variant of a concept has. “Love” and “God” are labels for something; people don’t invent names for no reason, so the correct question is whether two people mean the same thing when they use the word “love”. By “meaning” here I mean a very organic set of feelings as well as linguistically expressible stuff. I can see how this extends to God. So the question is again not whether a god exists, but rather what properties someone’s conception of God has. But still even here you could imagine that someone’s God concept could be horrendously self-contradictory. Schopenhauer argues quite convincingly that one concept of a Christian God is unacceptable:
“… According to this doctrine, then, God created out of nothing a weak race prone to sin, in order to give them over to endless torment. And, as a last characteristic, we are told that this God, who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every fault, exercises none himself, but does the exact opposite; for a punishment which comes at the end of all things, when the world is over and done with, cannot have for its object either to improve or deter, and is therefore pure vengeance. So that, on this view, the whole race is actually destined to eternal torture and damnation, and created expressly for this end, the only exception being those few persons who are rescued by election of grace, from what motive one does not know. … Putting these aside, it looks as if the Blessed Lord had created the world for the benefit of the devil! It would have been so much better not to have made it at all.”
I can’t recall if Schopenhauer takes the last step and declares the existence of the god he describes impossible, and in general who’s to say that a worst case characterisation is not true. The same can be said of love, and occasionally one hears mention of the impossibility of “true love”, or how it’s all “just” the action of various polypeptides, or how it just evolved to trick us all into reproducing, etc. These ideas could be correct.
One problem with discussing this stuff is perhaps solvable by making explicit the different ways psychological things are described in general. I like the idea of personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. So at the personal level you focus on feelings, people are in control of their actions, you focus on what it means to be a person, holistically. At sub-personal levels of explanation, upon which the personal level is built I suppose, you can talk about what influences (in a strong determininistic sense) behaviour and feelings. It’s crucial to make clear at what level of explanation one speaks to avoid making category mistakes (and more importantly to avoid making others miserable).
To elaborate further, I imagine it will never be the case that a therapist would sit a client down and say:
“Ah you’re depressed today. Well we inhabit a deterministic universe so a set of experiences beyond your control has caused you, together with genetic predispositions, to feel the way you do and to behave the way you have, including, thankfully for you, your inevitable decision to come to me today where I will (because of my life history and genome) tell you what I’ve just told you and begin a set of interventions where I’ll make you believe you’re in control of what you’re doing but actually that belief, that feeling of conscious choice, is just an unavoidable epiphenomena resulting from the deterministic but random process of evolution which brought us all here.”
This could, on some level, be a true characterisation of what’s going on, but the problem is that we feel we are in control regardless of what the physics says, and our language, including word-emotion relations, evolved accordingly. Back to love again, many of us have a pure and beautiful notion of love which comes mainly from feelings and can’t adequately be put into words and certainly cannot be adequately expressed by any (necessarily sub-personal) scientific theory.
This reminds me of empirical work. Laing, Phillipson, and Lee’s (1966) book Interpersonal Perception is on the very subject of trying to determine empirically if two people have a shared set of ideas about each other. They use questionnaires with questions like:
How true do you think the following are?
- She understand me
- I understand her
- She understands herself
- I understand myself
How would SHE answer the following?
- “I understand him”
- “He understands me”
- “I understand myself”
- “He understands himself”
How would SHE think you have answered the following?
- She understand me
- I understand her
- She understands herself
- I understand myself
The idea is that by comparing people’s answers you can predict stuff about their relationship. I imagine this sort of thing could be helpful to determine if two people or a group of people have compatible notions of love, God, life, the universe, and everything. But perhaps the more natural way to discover such things is the good old traditional technques of meeting people and having a wee chat…
