Meditation on Camus

 

   It has taken me a long time to discover what philosophy is. It is what I might now call the hunger for reality. Not for knowledge in the narrow sense, not for theories or systems, but for something more.

     Over time, I’ve come to think of reason not as a faculty of calculation or detachment, but as our capacity to respond to reality in all its forms. That includes logic and clarity, but also receptivity, discernment, reverence. I no longer believe in the fiction of neutral reason. There is no view from nowhere. Every position, every conviction, every doubt arises from a way of being in the world, shaped by a particular life, a history, a mood. That does not make truth relative. It makes truth demanding, something we must be formed to receive. My convictions about the authority of grief, the reality of love, the good that breaks through even in sorrow. . . are not born of argument alone. They are tried and tested. Not by the reductionists, who dismiss such things from the outset, but by those whose despair or clarity leads them in another direction. Macbeth, with his deadened soul. Hamlet, suspended between being and non-being. Ivan Karamazov, who sees too clearly to believe in a reconciled world. Camus, who chooses revolt over meaning. I take these not as errors but as serious interlocutors, philosophical companions in the truest sense. They offer visions of reality as fully earned as I pray my own is.

     And this, too, is part of what philosophy is: the encounter with other ways of seeing, not to defeat them, but to test whether what I see can hold its shape when pressed against theirs. If my convictions were sentimental, they would collapse. If not, they deepen. Not through logical defense alone, but through fidelity to what has shown itself, what I have suffered, what joy I have known; in the people I have hurt, in the eyes of my children, and in the starry heaven that so moved Kant.

     Philosophy is not a method for securing certainty. It is a way of attending to what has been revealed, remaining vulnerable to it, allowing it to shape you. There is no clean foundation. Only entry points into the circle of meaning – love, joy, grief, hope, remorse, faith. One must begin somewhere. What matters is not where, but whether one remains faithful to reality as it continues to unfold. And so I go on thinking, not to solve, but to attend more deeply. I go on because the love that called me into this world has not yet said its last word. 

. . .

      It is not as though I deny the absurd. I see it too. I think people are confused who draw such conclusions about the world from metaphysical arguments like ‘nothing is real that can’t be in principle shown by physics’; my only response would be to show the error in reasoning. Things like that don't touch me directly; only indirectly thorough their cultural power and the effects of that power. But to believe the world is absurd or horrible because a bomb has killed everyone in your family is something else entirely. The brokenness, the seeming indifference of the world to our deepest hopes. The suffering of innocents. The fleetingness of joy. The cruel finality of death. I see all of this, and do not look away. I understand why Camus wrote that the absurd is born from the collision between the longing for meaning and the silence of the universe. I know that silence too.  I just cannot stop there.

      I have also known the experience of grief (not as a private psychological event, but as a revelation). I have seen in the grief of a father for his dead son not simply the collapse of personal hopes but the tearing open of a deeper truth: that the child mattered. That his life was not a contingency or a trick of nature or a projection of meaning onto an empty canvas. He was good. His life was good. The grief bore witness to that.

      The same with love. Not the cheap romanticism that passes for love in popular culture, but the love that endures, that protects, that forgives, that sees the beloved in their weakness and still says: it is good that you exist. It is easier to give such love, rare as that is, than to receive it. This, too, seems to me not a self-made illusion, but a response to something real. Something given.

      Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy. I can admire that in a way. There is nobility in refusing false hope, in carrying the burden of life with open eyes. But it still seems to me a kind of resignation. It is a defiance that presupposes the meaninglessness it then bravely accepts. It does not seem to me that Sisyphus’s joy could ever compare to the joy of a parent watching their newborn child sleep, or of a penitent receiving forgiveness, or of someone who feels, for the first time in a long time, that they are not alone. I do not deny the darkness. But I do not believe the darkness has the last word.

     And so I return to my central conviction, the one that keeps recurring: that our deepest responses – our response to birth, to death, to love, to beauty, to evil – are not distractions from reality but encounters with it. If these responses are not delusions, then Being is not empty. Then love is not a trick. Then hope is not madness.

     This does not mean I have certainty. Not knowledge in the Cartesian or Kantian sense, but a kind of trust. Not in myself, but in what is shown, if I am open enough to receive it. It is a form of being true to the Earth, as Nietzsche wanted us to be. 

      Camus challenges me as do the great tragic figures like Macbeth, Hamlet, Ivan Karamazov. They represent real possibilities. I do not sweep them aside. But I cannot live in their world. And the reason is not wishful thinking, but being true to experience. 

 Rambling Meditation on Love, Philosophy, Angels, Heaven, Death, and Culture (10)

     As Plato/Socrates understood, love is defined by a lack. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, which thus implies the lack of wisdom. Philosophy exists because we lack wisdom, just as love exists because we lack the beloved. This is part of being human, mortal, finite. Our finitude, our being incomplete, being on the way, never fully possessing truth: that is essential to our humanity, as is our mortality, our existence in time (which for us takes the form of history). I can only wonder how it would be to be an angel. But angels, if they exist, aren't human, qualitatively different. If angels exist, they presumably lack our human restlessness, our need to search, the painful but beautiful struggle for understanding – for those who have kept their minds open. Angels, if they exist, cannot love as humans love, as love is bound to need, and need belongs to those who are finite. Angels, if they exist, cannot philosophize; they do not lack wisdom, at least not in the sense that we do. Perhaps angels see clearly what we only grasp in flashes of insight. I guess some human beings wish they were angels, and perhaps some angels wish they were human. Who's to say what would be better.

      Perhaps some angels would envy us our longing, our struggle, the meaning that comes from searching rather than possessing. This thought recalls Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where he suggests that the human condition, which is full of uncertainty, beauty, suffering, striving, is unique, and that angels, for all their perfection, lack it. And the film Himmel über Berlin, which I am sure draws on Rilke's poems. I suppose I would be greatly tempted were I offered the chance of transforming into an angel. I feel keenly my intellectual, moral, and spiritual limits and bang against their walls constantly. I would hope I had the wisdom to remain human.

    The desire to be more than human – reminds me for some reason of Galadriel's choice not to take the ring of power in the LOR. Galadriel’s refusal to take the Ring is precisely the kind of choice to remain finite rather than to grasp at absolute power or absolute knowledge. She could take it, she could be more than she is, but she knows she would cease to be herself. And that’s the real temptation: Not just the desire to be more than human, but the fear that in becoming something "greater," we might lose what makes us human (or elvish) in the first place. The very limits that frustrate us are also what define us.

. . .

     In Christian myth, it is often said we will know all the answers in Heaven. I have thought that would erase our humanity. I imagine heavenly life rather like the lives of Tolkien's elves on Middle Earth, world enough and time to be more than we can be in our short lifetime. But that analogy has limits. The Elves in The Lord of the Rings have time enough time to master craft, cultivate wisdom, and grow into the fullness of their nature without being so finite that everything is cut short too soon. They don’t struggle with mortality in the way humans do, but they still experience change, history, and meaning. But even the Elves eventually fade. Their time is long, but not endless. The Christian vision of Heaven, I suppose, would have to be something different.

    What would happen to C. S. Lewis’s 'joy.' or Sehnsucht in Heaven? Lewis’s idea of joy as the deep, aching Sehnsucht, the longing for something beyond this world was central to his thought. He saw it as a kind of homing instinct for Heaven, an indication that we were made for something more than what we find in this life. Lewis I guess thought the longing would be fulfilled in Heaven. And we will be as gods. Humanity aufgehoben (transcended) in Heaven. And then what?

     I am not sure what Lewis would say. He might have imagined Heaven not as a static state of perfect satisfaction, but as an infinite journey into deeper being, deeper love, deeper joy, always growing, never-ending, but without the pain of lack. He intimates this in The Last Battle, where Heaven is described as an endless ascent, always moving "further up and further in." But the question is unsettling: if our longing is what makes us human, what happens when longing itself is gone? Would we become something unimaginable: a kind of being whose joy is no longer tied to unfulfilled desire? Would we still be ourselves without that ache, that reaching beyond? Or if we take the Lewis-Tolkien view, perhaps Heaven is not the erasure of longing but the transformation of it: not longing for something absent, but an infinite deepening of presence, always more to see, more to love, more to understand. Would that kind of Heaven preserve the best of longing, or does longing-joy itself require lack, finitude, incompleteness, which Heaven, by definition, cannot have? Fiction and myth are more appropriate for speculating on this aspect of our humanity than philosophy.

    Anthropologically, any kind of heaven negates our humanity. Anthropologically, any kind of Heaven, at least as traditionally conceived, would mean the end of humanity as we know it, because our mortality is constitutive of what it means to be human. (A denial of transcendence, a pure naturalism, would also end it.) The bittersweetness of life, the longing that is never quite fulfilled, the fragility that gives weight to love, to loss, to meaning – all of that would be erased in a state of immortality, and we would become something other than human. Our humanity is tied to the world. Our mortality is constitutive of our humanity, the bitter-sweetness of life, the kind of Sehnsucht or joy Lewis describes. Tolkien's Elves are closer to humanity than angels. To become god-like – as Christians imagine us in heaven – is simply the Aufhebung (overcoming) of humanity into something higher. (Nietzsche thought that Christianity was a hatred of human life.) In that view our humanity is just a stage of life, rather like childhood. It would certainly be wonderful, that Heaven, that leaving our humanity behind ("The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to"as Hamlet put it. And death "a consummation" even without Heaven.) To become god-like. No death. No violation of evil. To go beyond the human. That seems to energize the dreams of Heaven. Perhaps Nietzsche was right. Is human life something that in itself is something we should want to put behind us?

       Having been responsible for bringing children into this life, I can't think like that.  And perhaps I am foolish, but something would be lost in that glorious state, as the angel in Himmel über Berlin longing for the human indicates. And in Tolkien's mythology, I have read, the Elves partly envied man his mortality. They still experience history, change, loss, beauty that fades, even if on a much longer scale. And the Elves' envy of human mortality implies that what we see as a curse might actually be a gift – the gift of urgency, of meaning heightened by finitude. This is what Himmel über Berlin captures: the idea that an eternal being might long for the intensity, the fragility, the aching beauty of human existence.

But this is like science fiction, using myth to explore our essence of human beings. Metaphysically it is a mystery about which little can be said other than, hopefully, some sort of justice and mercy.

      Perhaps justice and mercy rather than infinite knowledge or godhood is all we can truly hope for. Because what else could we wish for in the end, other than to be gathered in love, to see that suffering was not in vain, that goodness meant something, that loss is not the last word? Hope is more important than certainty when thinking about what comes after. It’s not about knowing, but about trusting that whatever is beyond us is not alien to what we have loved here.

    This seems to me more fitting to our nature as creature. It makes no sense to me to imagine a Creator who creates the material universe, time and space, out of an overflowing love, just to have us love it as we may love sugar, a means to the end of pleasure, though pleasure wouldn't be the right word. It seems more fitting, given the supposition of a loving Creator, to love the gift of Creation, to be "true to the earth" as Nietzsche put it. If we are creatures, then it is fitting to think of our existence as something given, something meant to be received, not something to be transcended or discarded like an outgrown shell. The idea that creation itself is just a temporary means to a higher end, rather than something intrinsically good, does indeed seem unworthy of a Creator whose nature is love. It makes more sense to me, given the supposition of a loving Creator, that we are meant to love the gift itself, not merely as a means to something beyond it, but as something good in its own right. It is a Biblical idea that we are stewards of the gift, the earth is precious and part of our humanity shall be measured in terms of how well we love and care for it (We are doomed if that is the only standard. Perhaps we are meant to be true to the earth, to cherish this world, this life, this fleeting, fragile beauty – not just as a test or a passageway, but as something worth loving for its own sake.

. . .

       And death loses a bit of its sting if – what is almost impossible today – you have a community that persists in time, loving families, where knowledge and wisdom are passed on, and the essential stories, where a world worth having survives you. Then death can be seen as a gift truly given to those who come after you who have a chance to experience it all, as a beloved German professor of mine, Thomas Baldwin, once expressed it to me. (Dr. Baldwin was a Methodist.)  But capitalism has killed that sense of historical continuity and a community with tradition that preserves what is truly valuable.

  I believe that death would lose much of its sting when it is embedded in a world that continues, in a culture, in a family, in a tradition that outlives us. Then death is not just an individual loss, but part of the great movement of life, part of something that persists, that carries meaning forward, that allows the world to go on being experienced by others who come after us. It becomes a true gift – not an annihilation, but a relinquishing, a making-room, a passing on. Perhaps the unnatural-seeming of death marks our alienation more than an essential feature of our humanity. Capitalism has shattered that sense of continuity. It has severed us from tradition, from generational wisdom, from a world that persists in time. It has turned human life into an isolated, consumable experience, rather than something woven into a larger story. And so death today feels not like a gift, but an abyss because there is no world left to give it to, no living community that receives it, remembers, carries forward what mattered. Therefore, it is possible that much of modern anxiety about death is not really about death itself, but about the loss of a world in which death had a rightful place; the violating of the possibility of a world in which it was not the end of meaning, but part of a larger, enduring human story.

   I am reminded of a Schiller poem, which is a bit sentimental, perhaps: "die Götter Griechenlands." (The Gods of Greece). He wrote "damals trat kein gräsliches Gerippe" (then with death there appeared no frightful skeleton). He imagined in the poem a more life-affirming culture of death. The truth the poem wants to communicate is that while death itself has not changed, our way of seeing it has. And this reflects a deeper change in how we understand life, beauty, and meaning. The Greek gods and myths, at least as Schiller idealizes them, gave death a place within life, rather than making it a terrifying, alien rupture. The gods themselves were woven into the world, and so death, too, belonged within a world that was still luminous, still meaningful. But as the gods faded, death became something dark, grim, final… something not within life but against life.

     That kind of mirrors the idea I am exploring: death in itself is not necessarily terrifying, but its meaning depends on the world in which it is embedded. If it belongs to a culture that continues, a world worth passing on, then it is a transition, a relinquishing, a making-room. But if nothing endures, if capitalism has uprooted continuity, then death becomes nothing more than the end of an isolated individual experience – indeed, a meaningless void. There has been a loss of, or from my point of view the prevention of the coming into being of a cultural and metaphysical framework that make death comprehensible, that made it something one could be reconciled to or even affirm (out of a love for the world and other living beings).

    The problem isn’t just that death is frightening; it’s that it no longer makes sense. It has become an absurdity, an intrusion, because the world around us no longer provides a structure in which it belongs. No wonder we banish it from our lives into the hospital and hospice. And if culture no longer provides a framework for death, it also means it no longer provides a framework for life – I mean for continuity, meaning, the passing on of wisdom, the preservation of what is truly valuable, all those things Wendell Berry pleads for. Without that, we are left with nothing but the individual; we are alone, cut off from both past and future, left to face the abyss without guidance, without tradition, without a world that holds meaning beyond fleeting personal experience.

    It thus is understandable why modern culture is so anxious about death. It is not because people are more afraid than they used to be, but because we have lost the means to understand it. And the irony is that, in uprooting death, we have also uprooted life, turning it into something isolated, fragmented, disconnected from any enduring human story.

 

Eros and Reality (9) 

I think sexual love, Eros, provides a challenge to the thesis that reality can be disclosed through our deepest responses to it (circular since emotions are deep precisely because they disclose). But Eros seems so connected to the sex drive and is notorious for creating an Ideal out of the beloved that life over time cannot hold up to - it makes promises it cannot keep, as Lewis put it. And of course there are massive sentimental forms of Eros, and sometimes it does seem to be a veneer disguising lust. It seems concealing. Examples of Eros abiding over time are few. And most people know what it is like to “see the lover through rosy colored glasses” only to take off those glasses at some point and be confronted with a sobering reality. In spite of this, is there a sense in which Eros can be revealing? Perhaps offering a vision of the beloved that transcends her empirical reality but nevertheless has some reality as potential?

  

. . .

Being in love is very different from the desire for sex. Most people in love will tell you that chastity and fidelity are never easier than when you are in love. Being with, being loved by, the beloved sublimates any desire for sexual gratification. That is a sure text of whether it is love or love-as-a-mask-for-sex: the pressure of one partner on the other for sex. Of course, the love is sexual root and trunk – but the branches and the blossoms are where being in love happens.

. . .

Eros is certainly not “safe.” It is a powerful energy that can overwhelm us. It is a form of madness. It has to power to generate life. The fools that invented that PR campaign about condoms making sex safe accurately express the capitalist view of sex as a form of energy to be mined for pleasure and profit. But they don’t know shit about Eros. There is nothing less safe than sex.

. . .

Eros is a complex case, perhaps the most ambiguous of all emotional responses in relation to truth. It is often concealing rather than revealing, creating illusions about the beloved, making promises it cannot keep, and sometimes degenerating into mere sentimentality or even self-deception. I rather think this is the norm. Yet Eros does seem to reveal something, even if what it reveals is not always the same as what it first appears to promise.

 

  Eros idealizes the beloved, seeing not just who she is, but who she could be, perhaps even who she is meant to be, who she is in essence. It is a vision but the vision can either be a projection of the lover’s own psychic programs or a response to an independent reality of the beloved that only love illuminates. This idealization is normally unsustainable but does that make it false? Or does it disclose a real potential that ordinary perception might miss? Thus Eros reveals something possible, something latent in the beloved, even if time, habit, and imperfection often blur that vision.

     The intensity of Eros, its almost religious character in some cases, suggests that it reveals something more than just biological desire. Many cultures and philosophies have linked sexual love to a longing for transcendence. One of my favorite books (although I am critical of Socrates in it), Plato’s Symposium, is the obvious example where physical love is a step toward the love of the Good itself. Even if most eros fades, the experience it provides – of beauty, of Sehnsucht, of the yearning to unite with another, of a weird kind of self-transcendence – suggests something real about human nature: that we are not self-contained, that we long for completion, that love (when real) is an openness to something beyond the self. (Aristophanes myth in the Symposium).

  But Eros is also deceptive. It can mask base desires, can make us blind to faults, can create illusions about the beloved. It often idealizes the beloved in a way that time cannot sustain. But even this disillusionment can be revealing. When the illusion fades, what remains? If love still abides in some deeper form, was Eros just a passing dream, or was it a necessary gateway to something enduring? If it endures, it is because the lovers are good people, probably supported by a community that nourishes this sort of transformation.

    If Eros gives a glimpse of the beloved’s potential being, does that potential have ontological status? Does the vision of the beloved in the intensity of Eros show something true about her essence, even if it is rarely fully realized? Or does Eros only show us our own projection, a fantasy imposed on another? Usually the latter in our world but the former is possible. If that is wrong, if all eros of nothing but projection in the service or biology + psychic programs, then Eros is merely a trick of evolution, a sentimental lie, a veil that must be lifted (I think of Schopenhauer here). If I am right, true love can be, however rarely, a kind of truth that exceeds empirical facts.

      I hoffe, daß Eros  den Sex-Instinct aufhebt, wenn sie echt ist, und verwandelt sie dabei in etwas fast Göttliches. It can then be sublime. Perhaps it is even connected to the capacity to see each other as intelligible objects of a more Christ-like love. When real, it transfigures desire into something deeper, something enduring, something that ultimately has nothing to do with mere physical satisfaction and everything to do with seeing the beloved in the light of true love. In its highest form, Eros is not just about union, but about revelation—it shows something about the beloved that goes beyond the moment, beyond mere instinct, beyond even personal happiness. It has a moral and metaphysical depth, a capacity to open the lovers toward something greater than themselves. (I am not thinking primarily of Dante, though I guess that is the point of Beatrice) but Wendell Berry and what he has written in poetry and essays about marriage in general and his marriage in particular.

    It flows into the child, which I see as its fruit and completion, an embodiment in the material world of the Trinity. In a sense, Eros is fulfilled not in its own intensity, but in what it gives birth to: not only literally in the child but in the shared world, the common life, the responsibility, the deepened love that grows over time. If Eros is real, it doesn’t burn out; it roots itself in the world, in a place, a home, a tradition that honors love, children, and the virtues needed to sustain them. The Word has to become Flesh to become fully real. The common task of raising the love-child is then the glue that allows the initial passionate love to deepen, especially when it is connected to a place on earth and a community that honors love, children, the nature of the place, the virtues necessary to make a good life. But this is an ideal and it is rarely ever actualized. Nevertheless, that is our nature, I think, a nature that is stunted by capitalist society. That fact that our natural potential is rarely actualized does not make Eros false. Rather, it means that we live in a world where our nature is often thwarted, where conditions for its fulfillment are fragile, where the fullness of love is something always threatened by loss, by disillusionment, by time, by the world as it is, by the scars on our character and personality left by living in this society. But if it is our nature, then Eros is not a lie. Even if it often fails, burns out, turns to illusion, its true direction is still real. It points toward a kind of completion that the world rarely allows but that remains the deepest truth about human love.

 So the Word must become Flesh to endure. But it is our "nature" or rather second nature to live in a world in which we are alienated from our first nature, which we can only experience as a romantic dream, except on rare occasions when something sublime breaks through, as it sometimes does when we "fall in love." Love must be incarnated in real life, in real relationships, in the world of time, of struggle, of responsibility. Otherwise, it remains just a longing, an unfulfilled ideal, as it invariably must in capitalism. We live in estrangement from what we are meant to be, and so what should be natural to us – love, community, continuity, a life in harmony with meaning – feels out of reach, like a dream rather than reality. It is in our second nature to be alienated from our first nature. [Again, the regime. I do not condemn business as such, which can be benevolent. Even in this regime most businesses are benevolent. I don’t want to get rid of small and medium-sized businesses but root them and see them as part of a community rather than as a parasite preying on community. Like it does to Eros, capitalism as a regime ironically corrupts business, too.]

Still, even in the darkness of the regime of Science-Capitalism-Technology, whether its liberal or autocratic forms (I prefer the liberal form since the thought of disappearing for writings like this does not appeal to me and liberalism preserves something of humanistic values), something sublime can still break through, something that reminds us that this dream is not entirely unreal, like a leak from another realm – something that belongs to the reality we have been cut off from, even if we can only glimpse it in falling in love, in moments of deep joy, in true companionship, in beauty, in the birth of a child. Etc. So falling in true love is not just an illusion but a momentary lifting of the veil, a flash of recognition that this is how things should be, even if life in its brokenness cannot sustain it. It shows us what is possible, even if the world drags it back down. It is a form of madness as the Greeks knew. But as Peter O’Toole’s Cervantes says (in Man of LaMancha):

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness To surrender dreams - -this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! And maddest of all - to see life as it is and not as it should be!

This certainly applies to people in love.

   Few of us are free enough from damage to our personalities, few of us have known the conditions necessary for the cultivation of the virtues necessary to live in community with other people over a lifetime - and marriage is a very intimate form of community. The real tragedy is not that the ideal of Eros is false, but that we are too cracked, the world is too broken, to sustain it, to let the Word become flesh. Our glimpses of love’s truth are sometimes real, but they cannot last because we are estranged from ourselves and from the world as it should be.

 

From Essence to Meaning - another discussion with my son 

Kili and I were arguing over whether this is a toboggan:

                             

We both agree that this is a toboggan:

                               

A toboggan in my dialect of English is a hat for winter. The first recorded use of the word toboggan for a hat, as I read, was in 1929. Here is what I found:

The word “toboggan” comes from the Micmac word for sled: topaĝan. As this tribal word was adopted into French-Canadian vocabulary, its modern-day spelling transformed. With these changes came other variations in meaning and application, some of which vary dramatically from region to region. Once a word predominantly centered in the northeast, topaĝan in the form of “toboggan” can now be heard around the world in its use for describing winter sleds.

Toboggans generally refer to long sleds used for recreational purposes in the winter. This definition accurately reflects the word topaĝan’s Micmac origin. However, as time progressed, the last century saw enough shifts in the English language to affect even the usage of a new word like toboggan. As those who ride toboggans must dress up warmly against the winter weather, resulting in the wearing of knit caps and other accessories, the word “toboggan” came to mean more than just a sled.

Today, should you travel different regions of North America, it is likely that you will find pockets where commonly used words have a completely different and uncommon use. For example, the word “toboggan”. Although unmistakably to describe the long and heavy sled used for recreation in the winter, “toboggan” has come to mean “knit cap” in other parts of the continent. This trend can be explained as a kind of metonymy that developed as knit caps were commonly worn while riding toboggans. However, the use of “toboggan” as a sled remains the most popular choice for North America. (dictionary.kiwi.com)

 

     How would one define its essential features? Is the material accidental and essential? Is whether it rolls up at the end accidental or essential?

     I asked ChapGPT to define toboggan (as a hat, not a sled). Here is the result:

 

To define the essential features of a toboggan (as a hat, not a sled), we must distinguish between what makes it essentially a toboggan and what is accidental to a particular toboggan. These are the features without which it would not be recognized as a toboggan hat:

·        A knitted or fabric winter cap – The material can vary, but the concept entails a head covering designed for warmth in cold weather.

·        Close-fitting – It is not a broad-brimmed hat or loose-fitting headwear; it is meant to hug the head snugly.

·        Usually extends over the ears (or can be pulled down to cover them) – This is a functional aspect that distinguishes it from purely decorative hats.

·        Soft and flexible – Unlike structured hats (e.g., fedoras, cowboy hats), the toboggan is made of pliable material that conforms to the shape of the head.

 

This confirms my own understanding.

Now the accidental features, the contingent features that vary and are not definitional – again, from ChatGPT:

·        Material – Wool, cotton, acrylic, or synthetic blends all qualify. A hat made of metal or hard plastic would no longer be a toboggan.

·        Presence of a cuff – Some toboggans have a folded brim, but this is optional.

·        Pom-pom or no pom-pom – While some versions feature a decorative pom-pom, its presence or absence does not define the hat.

·        Rolled-up or slouchy fit – A toboggan may be worn rolled up to sit above the ears or left long to cover more of the head and ears.

·        Color or pattern – A bright red, striped, or plain black toboggan is still a toboggan.

 

Thus, a philosophically Aristotelian definition might be:

 

A soft, close-fitting, knitted or fabric winter hat, designed for warmth, typically covering or capable of covering the ears.

 

We can say: that definition identifies the concept expressed in my dialect by the word toboggan. Kili was still not convinced – is he just mistaken? Say his English teacher corrected even his attempt to call his hat a toboggan, saying a toboggan is a sled, not a hat, and my dialect has incorporated an incorrect use of the word toboggan into its linguistic habits. Would he be right?

. . .

 

  Now why for Heidegger or Wittgenstein would this definition – which let's assume clearly draws borders around the concept (it doesn’t; there are fuzzy borders) – not express its meaning or even its 'logical' meaning? Clearly, even though we assume an Aristotelian essential definition draws clear conceptual borders, Heidegger and Wittgenstein would each challenge whether such a definition truly captures the meaning of toboggan in any deep sense.

     For Wittgenstein (especially in the Philosophical Investigations), meaning is not given by definitions with necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather by how a word is used in life. The word toboggan does not have its meaning in some abstract logical structure – the proposition – but in the way it functions in different contexts. If someone from another dialect or region does not know the word toboggan as a winter hat (perhaps they only know it as a sled), no list of essential features would make them "see" what it means. As with my son. They would have to observe how it is used in a particular form of life. Since we live in Germany and I am the only source of native language use in my son’s life, that is difficult for him to do. For Wittgenstein anyway, meaning is not captured by borders but rather by family resemblance across many uses - which Kili does not really have access to. (If he lived in the USA he would notice that some people might call a looser-knit beanie a toboggan, while others might reserve it for a particular style. There is no fixed essence governing its use, only overlapping and shifting conventions based on analogical thinking. Logical meaning in Wittgenstein’s later view is thus not an internal essence but presupposes practice. Kili's practice is based on his personal experience and the idiosyncratic parts of his personality.) 

    This does challenge Aristotle. The Aristotelian definition draws borders, but Wittgenstein would say that real-world language-use is often less rigid, more flexible. A purely logical language wouldn’t work humanly. If someone calls a fleece-lined cap a toboggan in their dialect, there is no fact of the matter that they are "wrong." The definition does not explain how we actually learn the word toboggan, which is through immersion in a way of speaking, not through formal definition. So for Wittgenstein, the Aristotelian definition can be useful, but it does not define meaning itself, which is always contextual, practical, and embedded in life.

. . .

   Heidegger, in Being and Time, would critique an essentialist definition for reducing Being to a set of properties, rather than understanding how an object shows up in lived experience (Erschlossenheit or disclosure). A toboggan is not just a thing with properties; it is something we use in particular ways that are part of our world, the particular world of the southern and midwestern USA in the 1960’s. If you were to ask, "What is a toboggan?" Heidegger would say that to truly grasp its meaning, you must look at how the toboggan is revealed in everyday human existence, what it shows itself to be. The concept toboggan means different things for different existential contexts, to take just some obvious examples:

·        For a child: a source of warmth and comfort in winter.

·        For a factory worker: a product in a manufacturing process.

·        For someone hearing the word for the first time: a puzzle with no intrinsic meaning.

Defining a toboggan in terms of properties (knitted, close-fitting, etc.) misses the more fundamental question: What does toboggan mean as part of Dasein’s world, Dasein being Heidegger’s term of art for human being as a being that is there, in a world?

. . .

So:

Aristotle: The definition sets out necessary and sufficient conditions that capture the essence of a toboggan.

 Wittgenstein: No fixed essence... toboggan means whatever it is used to mean in actual linguistic practices. The definition is a summary of use, not a boundary. For Wittgenstein, meaning lies in the practice, not in conceptual precision.

 Heidegger: The definition is too abstract; meaning depends on how toboggans appear in lived experience (e.g., as warmth, as protection, as part of seasonal rituals). For Heidegger, meaning emerges through being-in-the-world, not from abstract analysis.

    Meaning, as opposed to making a taxonomy, is lived, contextual, and dynamic rather than fixed and essential. The question is not whether a clear essential is possible or not – we have to "look and see" as Wittgenstein wrote – but what it has to do with meaning. By extension, a statement 'my son is wearing a toboggan' can be true or false only if its meaning can be understood. But outside any context it – the 'proposition' in general – has no meaning. (Think of trying to translate contextless sentences.) The notion that you can rip out an utterance from living language, from the realm of meaning, and out of it construct a proposition and compare that to "reality" as it is outside of the realm of meaning, this as the way of philosophy, as the way of seeing the world right – this seems to be the issue, the assumption that meaning and truth can be separated, that we can extract a proposition from the realm of meaning, compare it to a reality that exists outside of meaning, and thereby determine whether it is true.

     This is precisely what Wittgenstein rejects in his later philosophy. The Tractatus assumed that propositions represent reality by picturing states of affairs, as though language were a neutral mirror. But in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein exposes this view. Instead of abstracting a proposition from context, we must ask how it functions within a form of life i.e. within a practice where it already has meaning.

       "My son is wearing a toboggan." For this proposition to have meaning, it already presupposes a shared language (the word toboggan is understood in this dialect); a shared world (we recognize objects like hats, sons, and the practice of wearing them); a form of life (this is an ordinary kind of statement within the human activity of describing clothing). If we rip this proposition out of its meaningful context and try to compare it to "reality as it is in itself," we no longer have anything to compare it to (cf. Goodman). The idea that we can somehow step outside language and check whether this isolated, decontextualized statement corresponds to reality is an illusion. It leads to hopeless paradoxes.

   I think Wittgenstein’s insight was that truth is not a relation between words and some meaningless, pre-linguistic reality. It is internal to language and life. It depends on whether the statement is meaningful within a practice. Thus, instead of saying "This proposition corresponds to reality," Wittgenstein would say: "This proposition makes sense within a human practice." If it makes sense, it can be true or false in that context. If it does not make sense (e.g., saying "My son is wearing a toboggan" in a world where nobody understands toboggan as a hat), then truth and falsity are irrelevant because there is no meaning. The traditional philosophical error, which Wittgenstein and Heidegger both try to undo in different ways, is the idea that: language is an abstract system that refers to a neutral, pre-given reality; truth is a matter of correspondence between propositions and this independent reality. Thus meaning is secondary to logic, something we can set aside to "get to the facts." But there is no such pre-given, neutral reality apart from the ways we engage with it through meaning. Meaning is not separate from reality; it is how reality shows itself to us. Language is “the house of Being,” as Heidegger says. Reality is disclosed to us in this human way. Thus, the philosophical problem is not about establishing truth by correspondence, but about clarifying meaning within human life, and questioning this as to what it discloses about Being – which is what I tried to do in the first entries of this project.

    I will risk drawing this conclusion on the basis of my discussion with my son over the question of what is, and what isn’t, a toboggan. The idea that philosophy’s task is to extract propositions from life and compare them to "the world as it really is" is a misguided assumption. Reality is not "out there" in some pure, independent form waiting to be compared to propositions. Reality shows itself through the structures of meaning that emerge in human existence. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein called this the Mystical. The everyday is mystical. Thus, the issue is not whether essential definitions are possible, but whether essential definitions give us meaning in the first place or whether meaning is always already embedded in the world that is disclosed to us before we ever attempt to define it.