307. Hume's Pile of Applesauce

You know, some philosophers are so damn wrong you've just got to quit being an academic and say, "This is a pile of applesauce."  And that's what I'm going to say about one of Alison Gopnik's favorite philosophers (The Atlantic, 10-15), and one of mine (once): David Hume.

The problem is The Self.  Hume says there is no such coherent thing.  There's just a bunch of perceptions and responses.  Gopnik  found that Buddha said pretty much the same thing and loved him for it, and loved connecting the two.  Postmodern French philosophers loved him for it, insofar as they can love any Anglophone philosopher.

OK, where's the applesauce?

J. D. Salinger points us to it.  Awed by the budding beauty and character of a British girl in the course of  his tearoom conversation with her (in "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor"), Salinger hears her put a standard slur on American soldiers.  "I hope that's not worthy of you," he says.  What would her slur not be worthy of?  My fourth-grade teacher hears me speaking the most awful trash on the playground, just so I can make it with some trashy kids, and says, "Roland, that's not you."  My mother, after I've verbally abused the girl downstairs, says, "That's not the Roland I know."  I blush with shame.

What I want Hume, Buddha, and all those postmodernists to tell me is this: What blushes?  What's your name for it?  Something raises expectations, something is trusted, something takes responsibility, something is embarrassed.  Even before my mother and my teachers spoke to me it was there, in me, an idea of what I was.  If it weren't why did I respond so?  Why did I blush?

Plato gave capitals to my idea of what I was. The Idea of Roland. That was abstract philosophy but it was close enough to my experience, to the words people around me used, to the words I used, in the world and inside myself, to check out.  Plato was twenty times closer to this thing my teachers saw in me and Salinger saw in the girl than Hume or Buddha or Paul de Man was.  The ordinary Medieval/Renaissance Christian, with his word "soul," was  thirty times closer.  Dante was forty times closer.  Donne sixty.  Milton a hundred.

Nobody whose time is short (not just me, friends) wants to waste any of it digging into a pile of applesauce.  We all could use a detector.  Here's one I'll pass on: any time you pick up "the destruction of the coherent Self," or any similar locution, keep going.  Life's too short.

89. Spooks and Virtues

Good American boy goes to college. Good American parents are afraid he'll lose his morals. Good American boy comes home and sure enough, he's lost his morals. Painful parent-son conversations.

That was the story in many families in the days before parents themselves had been to college, or daughters went there. In the United States, where masses of uneducated immigrants were rapidly enabled, by wealth or the GI bill, to polish their children, it's heard as a peculiarly American story. That may be, but the pain in it, I think, is simply Christian. It's peculiar to the Christian vocabulary.

Take that word "spirit." It started out as Latin spiritus referring to what went in and out of your throat when you breathe. Keep it there and you're alive. Lose it and you're dead. Where does it go? (It's a thing; it has to go someplace.) The ancients were pretty vague about that but the Christians who came along weren't. It (as Anglo-Saxon "soul") went to Heaven or Hell, depending on whether the dead person had been good or not.

But besides referring to a thing the word also, from a very early time, referred to an abstraction. The soul wasn't just something that went along with you and left you; it was you. Not the everyday, apparent you, though, and not even a summation of that apparent you. It was the essence of the apparent you, and all your values were bundled into it. The Greeks made sure this reference stuck.

So, just by the way the language developed, Christians entered the 20th century with this one word that made two very different references, one to a thing and the other to an essence. There is a connection, of course (a good essence gets the thing into heaven), but you need a God to make that connection. It's not necessary.

Now, those parent-son conversations. The son says that because of what he has learned in his science courses he's lost his belief in spirits — like God and human souls. His parents hear that he's lost his belief in values. Naturally. Values are "spiritual" things. They misunderstand his situation and are in pain.

You can't entirely blame the parents for their misunderstanding. Spirits and values have a lot in common. They're both invisible, they're both insubstantial, and neither dies. It's easy to see how thoughtful people of any education might slide from "spiritual" into "transcendent" and "otherworldly" and finally into "supernatural," tying goodness to a heaven.

I'd put some of the blame on the language the parents inherited. It's Halloween today. There are a lot of spirits out there, on front porches and roaming the streets. Are they spiritual? Not those things. But how can you be a "spirit" and not be "spiritual"? What kind of language has one word for both spooks and virtues?