Two friends were quarreling about politics. The first, seeking to prove his point, told this story:

“A young merchant once set sail with a wise old captain, his goods stored below. But when a storm struck, the captain judged that the only way to save the ship was to throw the cargo into the sea. The merchant cried out, ‘You are stealing what is mine!’ But the wise old captain replied, ‘Your goods are already lost. If I try to preserve them, I will lose both them and the ship. You speak as if there were no storm constraining our choice, but wishing does not make options real. Since the storm has taken away the possibility of saving the goods, it would be foolish to try.’”

The second friend said, “I concede your point. It is a mistake to attempt the impossible: ‘should’ requires ‘can.’ But it seems you have not heard what happened to the very same merchant the very next day.”

The first asked, “And what happened to him?”

So the second told this story:

“...the storm passed, and though his original cargo was lost, the young merchant, hoping to recover his fortune, purchased new wares on debt at the next port. Still angry at the captain, the young merchant sought another ship to take him home and found one, this time piloted by a more foolish and cowardly man. When they set sail, he again stored his goods below.

But once they were on the sea, the foolish captain, having drunk too much, arose in fear, imagining a storm when the waters were calm. In his panic he rushed to cast the merchant’s cargo overboard.

The merchant, made wiser by experience, cried: ‘Stop, you foolish man! You are truly stealing from me now, for here there is no storm, no necessity constraining our choice. You pretend constraint where none exists, and in so doing you do me wrong!’”

Moral: it is as great an error to invent necessity where there is none as to deny it where it presses upon us. Always attend to the context, and choose your captains well.

I. Introduction

The Trolley Problem

Moral dilemmas often force us to confront the limits of principle. Few examples make this clearer than Philippa Foot’s trolley problem (Foot 1967). A runaway trolley hurtles down a track toward five tied-up workers. By pulling a lever, you can divert it onto another track, where one person is tied down. Should you pull the lever?

At first glance, this presents a clash of moral absolutes: the duty not to kill versus the imperative to save lives. The paradox seems intractable—without context, we should not pull the lever (we should not kill), but within context, we seemingly must (to save four net lives). This tension, I will argue, reveals something fundamental about the structure of moral choice under constraint.

The Nature of Moral Constraints

It should be noted that the problem addressed in this paper is not confined to particular dilemmas such as the trolley case, but reflects a deeper and longstanding tension in moral and political philosophy. On one side stand idealist frameworks—most prominently Kantian ethics—which articulate universal moral principles but often fail to account for the constraints imposed by non-ideal conditions. On the other side stand realist traditions, associated with Hobbes and Machiavelli, which take those constraints seriously but risk abandoning the structure of moral norms altogether.

This paper proposes a resolution to this tension. By distinguishing between what is possible in principle (Can₁) and what is feasible under actual conditions (Can₂), we can preserve the insights of both traditions while avoiding their characteristic errors. Idealism correctly identifies the structure of moral goods, but fails when it ignores feasibility. Realism correctly tracks feasibility, but fails when it loses orientation toward genuine goods. The framework developed here—what I will call pragmatic idealism—aims to synthesize these positions into a unified account of constrained moral choice.

II. Mixed Actions and the Storm at Sea

Aristotle’s account of “mixed actions” in Nicomachean Ethics Book III (1110a–1111b) provides our philosophical foundation to the solution of the paradox. Consider his example: sailors in a storm throwing cargo overboard to save their ship. Outside a storm, deliberately destroying someone’s goods is unjust—even criminal. Within the storm, however, the choice transforms. The sailors no longer choose between preserving and discarding goods. They choose between losing the cargo or losing both cargo and lives.

Aristotle calls such actions choice-worthy kata kairon—according to the moment, in context (NE 1110a5-10). They are voluntary in one sense (the sailors choose to throw the goods) but involuntary in another (they would never choose to do this absent the storm). As Aristotle notes, “such actions, then, are mixed, but are more like voluntary actions; for they are worthy of choice at the time when they are done” (NE 1110a11-12). The key insight: context can constrain our options such that what would normally be immoral becomes the most choice-worthy action available, because better options become temporarily impossible to actually choose.

This is not mere relativism. The storm creates what we might call a “constrained choice situation” where the ideal option—save both goods and lives—becomes circumstantially impossible. The actual choice is between two evils: lose the goods (lesser evil) or lose everything (greater evil). In such contexts, choosing the lesser evil is not just permissible but morally required. Moreover, and crucially, in this situation, if one attempts to choose the ideal option of saving both goods and lives, one will be effectively rerouted to the worse of two evils, losing both goods and lives. And this when it was really possible to save lives with courageous sacrifice of the goods.

III. The Structure of Constrained Choice

Let us formalize this structure. In any moral situation, we can identify a possibility space of options ranked by their choiceworthiness:

Diagram 1 represents the basic 3-option moral possibility space. A > B > C where > represents comparative choiceworthiness. Option 1 (labeled “Good”) represents what is choiceworthy in ideal conditions—choiceworthy unconditionally. Options 2 and 3 (labeled “Evil”) represent what is not choiceworthy in ideal conditions, but only conditionally choiceworthy when nonideal conditions prevent choosing the unconditionally good option.

In concrete terms:

• Option 1 = the ideal option (save all lives, keep all goods);

• Option 2 = the constrained good, or lesser evil (save some lives, jettison the cargo);

• Option 3 = the ruinous option, or greater evil (lose all lives, lose all goods).

In ideal conditions, Option 1 is available and morally required. We must choose it. But what happens when a storm constrains our choices?

Diagram 2 represents how moral constraints per accidens (in this case a storm) prevent the agent from choosing the morally good option (1) and force them into a choice where they must select the lesser of two evils (either 2 or 3). But what happens when an agent, confronted with this constrained situation, nonetheless attempts to choose the now-impossible ideal?

Diagram 3 represents toxic idealism: the error of attempting to choose an option that constraints have made impossible. Notwithstanding the moral constraint, the agent attempts to choose the ideal option (1) anyway. However, in this constrained case, attempting to choose the ideal option reroutes into the greater of two evils (3). Hence the toxic idealist chooses the impossible good and gets the greater of two evils, even when the lesser evil (2) was available. Choosing a worse option than is available is definitionally irrational, and reveals the need for at least some pragmatism.

This is precisely what would happen to the merchant in our fable if he refused to let the wise captain jettison his cargo: by attempting to preserve goods that the storm has already made impossible to save, he would lose both the goods and the ship.

IV. Applying the Framework to the Trolley Problem

The trolley problem maps directly onto this structure. As Thomson (1985) elaborates in her development of Foot’s original case, the villain who tied people to the tracks has created a storm-like constraint: someone will die regardless of our choice.

Our solution to this problem is parallel to our solution in the goods-on-a-ship case. In that case, the sailors must accept either that the goods must be thrown overboard or that the goods will go down with the ship. Hence in every case treating “save the goods” as a live option is unrealistic: the goods are lost in either case, and should not enter as a relevant factor in deliberation given the sure existence of the constraining context (the storm). Hence, the decision simplifies:

1. Either save the ship (and lose the goods)

2. Or lose the ship (and lose the goods).

Once the tragic reality of the situation is accepted, the solution to the problem is trivial.

Likewise, in the trolley problem, in either real case, someone will die. It would be nice if this were not the case, and not all cases are constrained in the way the trolley problem is. In such unconstrained cases, to kill an innocent person would be wrong. But in this case, ex hypothesi, the death of at least one is inevitable.1 The villain, in his villainy, has tragically made it so that someone’s life is inevitably forfeit. To pretend otherwise is to fail to appreciate the tragic reality of the situation.

Once we accept this constraint, we can reframe the decision: we cannot save everybody, but we may still choose to minimize harm. Crucially, this is importantly asymmetric from choosing to kill one person rather than five. For in our case, one death is, tragically, inevitable—imposed by the villain’s prior immoral action. Acknowledging this tragic inevitability, our actual choice is:

1. save no additional lives (do nothing)

2. or save some additional lives (pull the lever).

Within this constrained context, pulling the lever becomes choice-worthy kata kairon. It remains tragic—we must do something that, absent the constraint, would be murder. But given the constraint, it becomes the most choice-worthy action available.

V. The Surgeon Problem

One might attempt to collapse the distinction developed above by modifying Foot’s familiar organ harvesting case. Suppose the five dying patients are not victims of natural organ failure, but have instead been intentionally poisoned by a malicious actor. The constraint is now fully external—a “storm” not of the surgeon’s making. The case is thereby brought structurally closer to the trolley problem: a villain has imposed a condition in which multiple deaths are imminent unless some intervention occurs.

Does this transformation now license the surgeon to harvest the organs of one healthy patient to save the five?

Intuitively, it does not. The appeal to lesser-evil reasoning—even when supplemented by a constraint-sensitive principle such as Can₂ (practical feasibility under constraint)—does not yield a general permission to minimize harm by any available means. To see why, we must introduce a structural boundary between (A) redirecting an existing threat with the aim of minimizing harm, and (B) instrumentalizing an independent agent.2 This boundary echoes both Kant’s Formula of Humanity and the traditional Doctrine of Double Effect, but it can be stated more precisely in terms of constraint and feasibility.

Two Kinds of Constraint

We begin by distinguishing two fundamentally different sources of limitation:

1. Natural constraints are not produced by limited agents. These include storms, disease, scarcity, and other features of the world that delimit what is possible without anyone’s choosing them. Natural Constraints “just are,” and as such should be recognized, and taken into account during deliberation without moral condemnation, as this judgement would be entirely ineffective.

2. Artificial constraints are produced by limited agents. These include coercion, violence, deception, or any act that restricts another’s range of action. Artificial constraints, are subject to moral evaluation, and often to condemnation, because they unduly or unfairly limit the agency of another.

Pragmatic Idealism builds on this taxonomy through a commitment to what we may call Constraint Realism (CR):

Agents must deliberate within the feasible set defined by the actual constraint landscape, not an idealized or counterfactual one.

As such, “ought” is indexed to the feasible ideal, not merely to the imagined or theoretically perfect ideal. In the storm case, one cannot save both ship and cargo. The storm has removed that possibility from the space of available options. To deliberate as though it remained available is therefore abandoned fidelity to the real constraints of the situation.

That said, realism about constraints does not license their arbitrary creation, even to “solve” moral problems. The villain who ties innocent victims to the Trolley tracks, or poisons innocent patients, is ex hypothesi villainous.

A second principle is therefore required, the Principle of Non-Manufacture (PNM):

It is impermissible to introduce, or “manufacture” new constraints on others’ agency (or rights) that are not already present in the situation.

The impropriety of manufacturing constraint can be grounded in at least three ways.
Such constraint-creation constitutes a violation of rights, or more precisely, a violation of equitable regard of moral agency as such. In Kantian terms, it treats persons merely as means, subordinating one agent arbitrarily to the external ends of another, and so is intrinsically unjust. It is, further, self-defeating under recursive evaluation: a world in which such constraint-creation is permitted undermines the very conditions of agency it presupposes. All cases point to a fundamental asymmetry in one agent’s treatment of another -- a failure to regard agents as equal in basic dignity and therefore necessarily equitable in status. Thus, while constraints must be accepted once they exist, they must not be manufactured.

There is thus a temporal asymmetry, particularly at play in cases of villainy.

1. ex ante (before the fact), one ought not create unjust constraints; villainy is impermissible by PNM, and should be opposed.

2. ex post (after the fact), we must respond appropriately to the constraints that have already been created, whether naturally or artificially.

This introduces a key insight in cases of artificial villainy: we condemn the introduction of the constraint, but must still deliberate within its consequences. This is a limited kind of “acceptance” required for proper action, and is, we contend, a confounding factor in attempted solutions to the Trolley Problem.

For while we are claiming that a limited kind of acceptance ex post is warranted in order to deliberate properly in the case of the trolley problem, we by no means mean that the villain’s actions should be accepted ex ante, as to do so would justify injustice, and violate PNM.

Two-Stage Structure of Deliberation

Pragmatic Idealism therefore proceeds in two stages.

1. Constraint Assessment: the agent identifies the actual constraint landscape, determines the feasible set of actions given those constraints, and accepts both natural constraints and already-imposed artificial constraints as delimiting the situation.

2. Moral Selection Under Constraint: the agent optimizes within the feasible set subject to PNM, excluding any action that would unduly introduce new constraints on others.

A crucial clarification follows from this two-stage structure. The fact that a constraint exists does not imply that it is justified. We may be required to act within a ex post constraint while simultaneously condemning its origin ex ante.“Should” implies “can,” but “can” alone cannot justify “should.”

In our box-diagrams, this simplifies into a single rule: choose the leftmost available option, or choose the best available option, where best is determined, more or less, by Kant’s Formula of Humanity. How pragmatic idealism differs from Kant’s philosophy or standard rights-based philosophy is that it is a realist about constraints without devolving into mere utilitarianism.

Application of Constraint-Based Reasoning

The contrast is clearest in two canonical cases. In the storm case, the loss of cargo is imposed by nature; the feasible set excludes saving both ship and goods. Throwing cargo overboard is therefore permissible, albeit only in this case, as it respects the structure of the situation. This is a simple case of Constraint Realism (CR).

In the villain case, the constraint is introduced by an agent (the villain), and its introduction is morally impermissible ex ante—but once imposed, agents must still deliberate ex post within its consequences. The origin of the constraint and its violation of PNM determines its moral status, but its presence dictates the structure of proper deliberation according to CR.

Applied to the surgeon and trolley cases, this framework clarifies their intuitive asymmetry. In the standard surgeon case, (A) 5 patients are constrained by disease, but (B) 1 is healthy; killing the healthy patient manufactures a new constraint on an otherwise unconstrained agent, violating the prohibition on manufacturing constraints (PNM).

In the trolley case, all individuals (both the 5 and the 1) are already under constraint (tied to tracks). Redirecting the trolley, therefore, does not violate PNM by introducing a new constraint into the moral situation. Rather, it redistributes harm to a minimum within an already constrained moral set.

VI. Formal Principles

Hence, the governing principle (GP) can be stated directly:

It is impermissible to expand the set of agents subject to artificial constraint. Creating a new victim differs categorically from reallocating harm among those already constrained. Aggregate improvement does not alone justify the introduction of new constraints.

In short, then, Pragmatic Idealism is defined by the conjunction of two commitments: realism—one must act within the constraints that exist—and idealism—one must not become the source of constraints that ought not to exist. Against idealism that ignores feasibility, it insists on constraint-sensitive reasoning; against realism that licenses domination, it imposes strict limits on the creation of constraints.

With this framework in place, the key point may be stated precisely: externally imposed constraints may restrict the set of feasible options, but they do not thereby authorize agents to expand that set by conscripting new victims. We can formulate this as a feasibility condition:

A harm may be permissibly selected only if avoiding it is not physically and practically possible (CR) without introducing a new rights violation or expanding the set of persons subjected to harm (PNM).3

This yields a simple test: if one attempts to ignore the constraint and select the morally preferable outcome (e.g., in the trolley case, that no one be killed, in the ship case, that no cargo be jettisoned), does this succeed? If so, the constraint is not binding in the relevant sense, and lesser-evil reasoning is inapplicable. If not, then the agent must choose among the remaining feasible options.

In the trolley case, the constraint is binding in precisely this way. The threat is already in motion, and all affected parties—the one and the five—are already under duress. The agent (tragically) cannot avoid all harm, but they can minimize it. Given this constrained landscape, the available actions concern only how the existing harm unfolds (and whether it is minimized). When the bystander diverts the trolley, or when a captain throws cargo overboard in a storm, they are not creating a new harm-bearing structure but managing an existing vector of harm. The resulting loss is foreseen, unavoidable, and unintended—a byproduct of interacting with the constraint itself.

Crucially, all affected parties are already within the scope of the relevant external constraint (i.e. being tied to the tracks). As Kamm emphasizes, there is a fundamental difference between accepting a pre-existing constraint and manufacturing one (i.e. putting agents under duress). The sailors do not create the storm; the trolley operator does not bind the victims to the track. They respond to a structure imposed independently of their agency, in the sailor case, this constraining context is natural (and morally neutral), in the trolley case it is imposed by a villainous agent.

What matters, therefore, in this case is not so much the agent’s internal intention as the causal structure of his act. In permissible cases, the agent operates on an existing threat and does not conscript new persons into it, which conscription is implicitly granted in the trolley case to be villainous. In impermissible cases, the agent expands the structure of harm by incorporating an otherwise unthreatened individual.

The surgeon case differs in exactly this respect. Even under the modified scenario, only the five patients are under duress. The healthy individual remains outside the constrained choice landscape. The surgeon is not forced into a choice that includes them, rather, the surgeon must actively choose to involve them into the constrained landscape, against their will. This is wrong for the same reason it is wrong for the villain in the trolley problem to tie his victims to the tracks: he is unnecessarily violating their rights and constraining their options. To harvest their organs is therefore not to select among pre-existing harms, but to improperly expand the set of persons subjected to harm.4

This expansion marks the transition from redirection to instrumentalization. The surgeon does not merely navigate a constrained field of tragic options; he conscripts an unthreatened agent into the causal chain, using them as the mechanism by which others are saved. In doing so, he treats the healthy patient as a mere means—precisely what, for instance, Kant’s Formula of Humanity forbids.

He expands the set of persons under duress, using the healthy patient as the mere means by which the others are saved. In doing so, he violates the healthy patient’s rights.

This distinction can be stated formally as the constraint-origin principle:

Externally imposed constraints may justify selecting among unavoidable harms within a fixed set of already-affected persons. They do not justify introducing new persons into that set in order to improve outcomes.

The “storm” analogy clarifies the point. A storm may force a captain to choose among limited options concerning their own ship, including the loss of cargo. But it does not permit the captain to seize another vessel and sacrifice it as a shield. The constraint governs what may be done within the affected system; it does not authorize the creation of new victims outside it.

This framework preserves the core Kantian prohibition on treating persons as mere means, while refining its application. Standard Kantian formulations tend to evaluate maxims under idealized conditions in which all morally relevant options are equally available. They do not always distinguish between cases in which an agent creates a morally impermissible structure and cases in which an agent is forced into such a structure by external conditions.

Once the constraint landscape is properly recognized, this ambiguity is resolved. When all available options involve harm imposed by an external constraint, selecting the lesser evil need not involve treating anyone as a mere means. But where the agent must introduce a new victim to achieve that outcome, the prohibition remains absolute.

In short, externally imposed necessity can justify the minimization of harm within an already constrained system, but it can never justify the creation of new victims to resolve that constraint.

Cole Whetstone did his undergraduate work in Classics at Harvard University and received an MSt in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He taught Ancient Greek at Oxford and co-founded Oxford Latinitas, a society of Oxford academics dedicated to reviving Latin and Greek in scholarly use. He now lives in New York City, where he is a co-organizer for the New York Philosophy Club.

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In the tradition of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, let me begin with an old Jewish joke. There’s an ultra-orthodox rabbi that loves to play golf, obsessed to the point where he plays golf every day — well, every day other than Yom Kippur. As the joke goes, however, one year he decides to have a little “cheat day” and tee off on the holiday. Up in Heaven, God is watching, and Moses is livid.

“Lord,” Moses says, “look at this rabbi playing golf on our holiest day of the year! Surely, you’ve got to do something!”

To which God replies, “Don’t worry, keep watching. I have an idea.”

The rabbi swings for his first drive and, ding, what do you know - hole in one.

The rabbi swings again - ding! Hole in one. Again!

For a third time now, the rabbi drives and the ball goes right in the hole.

As they watch the rabbi walk to the green to get his ball now, Moses, who, mind you, had seen tribes slaughtered and his people lost in the wilderness for decades over lack of fealty to God, is stunned.

He turns to God in disbelief and says, “Now why in the world are you doing that! I thought you were gonna punish him!”, to which God responds, “Who’s he going to tell?”

I love this joke because it’s clever of course, but I think it also highlights an important point about integrity. When people cheat on their values or fail to do the right thing, they often lose that which it is they value most — even, or perhaps especially, as in this case, when no one is watching.

Despite knowing this, it’s often hard for us to really wrap our heads around this principle and how it applies to us. Of course we know in principle that action X is the right thing to do, but because it is difficult to do right now, and there will be no perceived difference if we don’t, we often make the judgment call that it will be okay to let it slide this one time.

Even when that little voice in our head squeaks at us to do the right thing, its grander notions are often seen as, at the very least, ignorable and subservient to our much stronger, ego-driven desires and libidinal impulses. As the sharp-tongued American essayist H. L. Mencken quipped, “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking,” underscoring the cynical perspective that the role of our conscience is merely in maintaining our appearances or social cohesion, not in enforcing our actual behavior. This quiet advisor’s warnings, what Freud called the superego and what Plato described as the charioteer’s noble horse in Phaedrus, while ostensibly important, often doesn’t factor into the calculus of our decision-making process and ideas of maximizing self-interest.

If we’re in a situation where we could do the wrong thing, but no one will know… well, then suddenly it’s much easier to shush that little voice, find an excuse for ourselves, and do as we wish.

While not immediately obvious, even in such a situation where we are the sole witnesses of our transgressions, this lack of integrity actually holds significant negative ramifications on your own being too.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where telling a tiny lie could prevent or delay a really undesirable situation? Maybe you had to attend a team meeting at 9 am. You woke up late though, and are definitely going to miss it. Nightmare! As you frantically put on your clothes, you write the boss that you’re on the way, but there’s heavy traffic. The boss writes you back that that’s ok, and no word is mentioned of your tardiness. Phew, right?

Or, maybe someone asks you if you’ve read a certain famous book before, one that you really wish you had already. For me, this is In Search of Lost Time, which, at this point, I may never have the time to start reading. To save face, you fib and say you’ve read it a long time ago and don’t remember it well. The person smiles understandingly, and soon the conversation switches to a new topic, and nobody suspects that you have never read a page of the book.

I’m guilty of having done both of these before, and we’ve all at some point said small lies to get out of an uncomfortable situation, or to make up for one of our deficiencies. Maybe you’re believed this time — people believe that there really was traffic or that you really did read the book — but that isn’t the problem here.

The problem comes later, next time you want to tell someone the truth or convince someone of your view. The problem comes when you’re put to the test and need to prove yourself, later down the line. You may hesitate, soften your statements, or feel a nagging sense that you’re posturing. Suddenly, that little voice we used to ignore has increased a few decibels.

Part of you, through repeated minor violations of integrity, has learned that sometimes — to be frank — you’re a liar. Sometimes, you’re untrustworthy. Sometimes, you pretend. Then, the next time you need to speak with conviction, your own conscience cries out against you.

Even when you go to tell the truth, part of you doubts yourself. “Am I really telling the truth? Is this actually what I believe?” it asks. “Because sometimes I say untrue things, and sometimes I do things I don’t believe in.”

In essence, you lose the capacity to mean what you say and say what you mean, and this tears apart your ability to speak from your soul, and express yourself in earnest with full force. As a consequence, regardless of if your tiny lies or misdeeds were caught before, your future truths will be less believable, and your capacity to influence will be diminished. Your creations and aspirations will flatten and hollow out, and your beliefs will become muddied. Integrity isn’t just moral cleanliness; it’s the proper posture that allows for strength of will, and the epistemic trust in yourself that echoes in everything you do.

There’s a now famous research study by Anders Ericsson that found that mastery requires around 10,000 hours of practice on average. If I had to guess, half of that effort was needed not for directly fine-tuning the associated skills, but indirectly, in order to develop the confidence and self-assurance to deftly employ them so instinctually. This is because only once you’ve repeatedly practiced showing yourself who you are can you learn to believe in your model of the world and yourself.

Which brings up perhaps the most compelling reason to practice integrity. Raising the stakes and putting aside the diminished capability to influence others, having a sense of integrity is the ontological glue that holds your world together. Without it, your entire existence will crumble. Does that sound hyperbolic? Allow me to explain.

In Discourse on the Method, rationalist philosopher Descartes first stated his key idea, “je pense, donc je suis,” translated properly into English as “I am thinking, therefore I exist.”1 Using his method of doubt, he proposed the thought experiment of an evil omnipotent demon who sought to deceive him about the entire nature of reality. With this in mind, Descartes systematically questioned all of his beliefs about the world, from what he saw around him to mathematical principles, until he could arrive at one irrefutable certainty amidst the deception of this demon. This one undeniable truth, that, “I am thinking, therefore I exist,” is concluded by the very act of searching for truth. For Descartes, the act of doubting itself proved the existence of a doubter, therefore establishing being as an essential truth of the one who thinks.

Because of this, the certainty of the thinking self or mind existing became the bedrock behind Descartes’ entire philosophical framework for rebuilding knowledge — all of human certainties were rooted in this core truth.

But what happens when you start to doubt your very own thinking? When you become uncertain of what it even is that you think and do, and if these thoughts and actions are even yours to begin with? When the internal relationship between reality and self-concept are so fractured and misaligned that even you no longer can determine the dissipating border of truth and lie?

I reason that, if thought grounds being, as Descartes proposes, then corrupting thought corrupts being. Integrity, as the trait which allows us to trust in our thinking, is then also the the trait that allows us to trust our very being. Given that thinking establishes existence in Cartesian thought, violations of integrity undermine our trust in our thoughts and therefore the foundation of our existence itself! In order for us to lean on our thinking as the bedrock under which we know our own existence, we must also trust that this thinking itself can be trusted. I believe that without continual integrity, our own thoughts become indistinguishable from one more of Descartes’ demon’s tricks, and this ultimate proof of your existence collapses under the weight of your own unreliability. The damage of lapses in integrity is not just moral, you see, but ontological.

And so there are enormous, life-and-death stakes behind each white lie and every moral misstep, stakes which each of us fail to meet all the time. It is imperative that we begin to do otherwise, however, as the groundedness to actually know the reality we exist in comes from the trust we develop in ourselves as steady self-narrators.

In line with this effort, I will admit that I have still not yet finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. Yet, I am aware of a well-known line from the novel, spoken by Father Zosima, that I believe illustrates the significance of this same rule:

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

If I were to add anything to this beautiful quote, I would continue by saying, “And unable to trust himself, he ceases to exist.” Each violation of integrity fragments the soul, and a fragmented self cannot fully think, fully choose, or fully be.

Aleko Brice is a 25-year-old writer and entrepreneur from Los Angeles, living in New York City since 2024. A recent university graduate with degrees in English Literature and Economics, Aleko enjoys thinking and writing about what makes life meaningful.

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I recently had a discussion with a friend centered around our innocent acts of performativity,1 a concept of which criticism is haughtily du jour in modern discourse. Certainly, after the maturation of satirical social trends that ironically glorify performative men (e.g., performative male contests, the rise of performative outfits in our algorithms), the concept of performativity must elicit some emotional reaction in everyone — and ideally, some intellectual perspective. This friend of mine held a strong Jung-esque one: that all performativity resulted from some unresolved childhood issue. In relation to the wave of performative men, my friend likened this fiercely to a generation rife with ‘mommy issues.’

I think it is an interesting idea, if only because it intuitively feels reasonable. Part and parcel of the widespread societal criticism of performativity is a distaste for the performative act — a societal desire to harken back to authenticity in its truest and rawest forms. Gone are the days when we endow the masquerading corporate worker with systemic valor. Rather, it seems we (especially those of my Generation Z) look up to idols who supersede the shackles of this ever-constraining world we inherited from our parents: the influencers, the entrepreneurs, the hustlers, the activists. So it seems inherent that those who seek to purposefully deceive others through their performativity are those who are deficient in some way, at least compared to our idols who uphold the utmost authenticity. My friend’s argument then naturally flows: this deficiency must be one rooted in our very formative childhoods.

Standing on its own feet, the argument has very funny implications: here we talk about a modern society built by the hands of men with undiscovered Oedipus complexes. But of course, as is the fallacy with any over-simplistic generalizations reliant on intuition, this one cannot be wholly true.

I say ‘wholly’ because I believe there is at least some merit to this cynical intuition. For one, I think we are right to feel trusting of those who are authentic and distrusting of those who are inauthentic. Our society stands to benefit by eliminating the influence of conmen and fraudsters. The optimal game-theoretic condition is one in which all parties cooperate in full thrust, punishing those who are caught for lying and cheating. And for another, perhaps it is true that those who perform are deficient — for what could propel performative people to intentionally perform, if not to attain something that could not have been attained without such performativity (e.g., social influence, validation)?

But what is performativity? I think we have taken the conflation of performativity and inauthenticity for granted in much of our intellectual discourse on the topic. But whereas the inauthentic refers to the expression of what is not part of your identity, the performative (especially as we understand it in modernity) refers to expression with the intent of influencing others. That is to say, although the intent of influencing others may permit the existence of some deficiency, it does not necessarily follow that this act results in any inauthenticity.

Surely, there are cases where this is so: the casual observer needs only to look at that first batch of matcha-drinking labubu-wearing Clairo-listening men who—before the discourse on performativity mimetically spread—truly believed that they were the paragons of femininity. But at its core, performativity is an integral part of our society. It is the medium through which all social currency is exchanged, as all forms of social transactions are subject to intentionality. That is to say, any interaction we have with another party will always be filtered through a lens that intentionally curates how we come across: through dress, mannerism, posture, speech, etc. Even (and especially) in cases that lack the gilded performative intention to ‘look better’ in front of others, any social interaction is always encoded with some form of intentionality, whether for love, power, knowledge, or even casual mirth.

II. Performativity Allows us to Survive and Thrive

Let’s consider the multi-round Prisoner’s dilemma. As opposed to the single-round game—whereby two parties have to independently decide whether to cheat or cooperate, then reap either the rewards or punishment coming from that decision—the multi-round game enables both parties to take stock of past decisions. Although one party might cheat in one round to reap an outsized reward, they will be penalized in all future rounds because they have effectively tarnished their reputation as an ‘unreliable cheater.’ Therefore, the optimal strategy for both parties (barring any extraneous circumstances) is to continually cooperate in order to maintain the benefits of cooperation.

This is a very similar argument to the dramaturgical argument that Erving Goffman puts forward in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he states that “when an individual appears before others, his actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have.” In the multi-round Prisoner’s dilemma, a history of continued cooperation between both parties defines a ‘cooperative’ situation, whereas any incursion by either party against this pristine history of cooperation would define a ‘hostile’ situation. But of course, Goffman’s explanation can also be used in complex realms of societal interactions, those in which any combination of thousands of actions can produce some unique situational definition for any given social interaction. Rather than the binary code of cooperate or cheat, the continuous spectrum of actions within our world signifies different variations of cooperation or cheating. For example, in a more ‘realistic’ multi-round Prisoner’s dilemma, you can have actions that yield different degrees of cooperation (e.g., staying silent vs. actively telling false information that would remove any suspicion from the other party) or cheating (e.g., confessing partially vs wholly). In any case, actions that help define cooperation can boost cooperative tendencies from the other party, and vice versa. Therefore, despite any intuitive urges for cheating, one would do well to perform actions that herald cooperation.

At its core, however, is the ‘reputation’ of cooperation, rather than the actual acts of cooperation. What is of utmost importance is the security of future cooperation from the other party (or parties in more complex social interactions), whereby you have built credibility for cooperativeness through your previous actions. This can be done through actions that aren’t explicitly cooperative. One clear example is deception: someone who confesses only minimally (enough to not cast suspicion on themselves) yet communicates a cooperative intention can effectively engineer a ‘cooperative’ situation while individually reaping the benefits of cheating.

III. Taste, or Performance-Maxxing

The field of appearances presents another interesting set of actions that can be enacted to engender cooperation without necessarily participating in cooperative activities. On a surface level, our appearance could be used to communicate identity with a particular group, with the aim of encouraging participation from that group through familiarity. For example, wearing a suit signifies involvement in ‘business’ through association, which could elicit trust from other businessmen due to familiarity (i.e., businessmen have known other businessmen to be cooperative in the field of business, and thus are more inclined to trust other businessmen based on association). This concept of familiarity is a crucial one — it is a short-circuited way of evaluating a stranger without any recorded history of past actions. In his essay Dandyism and Fashion, Roland Barthes argues that for a large part of human history, “To change clothes was to change both one’s being and one’s social class, since they were part and parcel of the same thing.” That is to say, our appearance played a pivotal role in communicating association with class, a pivotal piece of information to dictate the ‘situational definition’ of any social interaction in pre-modern history.

More interestingly for me, however, is what our clothes can imply in regards to taste—the concept that is all the rage in Gen Z discourse—and how it ultimately conveys cooperative intent. In the same essay, Barthes discusses the democratization of clothes after the French Revolution. Due to the disappearance of the rigid hierarchy of class in society, everyone began to have access to clothes that were previously ‘off-limits’ to people of their status. Due to this democratization, “the superiority of status, which for democratic reasons could no longer be advertised, was hidden and sublimated beneath a new value: taste, or better still, as the word is appropriately ambiguous, distinction.” By taste, Barthes talks about one’s ability to differentiate one’s outfits from the mass through discreet detail, despite wearing similar outfits (e.g., the way your cuffs are worn). But of course, this extends in today’s terminology not only to discreet detail, but perhaps any point of differentiation — color and proportions theory, knowledge of couture, familiarity with foreign indie brands, etc.

There are several reasons why taste can convey much of the same cooperative messages conveyed by ‘associative’ fashion. Barthes discusses taste as a unique differentiator for one’s peers — one is only able to recognize taste if one possesses taste. These peers, then, form a de facto group of tasteful people, with which association through fashion enables a similar cooperative intent from the group. But perhaps beyond the associative power, taste also conveys seriousness in craft. It is something that requires deliberate intention and curation, and thus a fashionable outfit is a marker of one’s high taste. Much like how admiration is naturally bestowed upon those who excel in traits valued by society (e.g., competitiveness in sports, charisma in speech), admiration is bestowed on one who exceeds in taste for the implication of their great work in acquiring such taste. This extends beyond the in-group — just as anyone is able to celebrate winners of a race without prior knowledge of track and field, one can recognize individuals who are much more fashionably dressed than their peers. Of course, there are limitations to this — just as it might be difficult for the uninitiated to understand the winners of a foreign sport (e.g., an American trying to watch cricket), it might be difficult for one to differentiate on certain elements of taste (e.g., Balenciaga conceptual pieces). However, it is generally the case that taste is discernible through beauty — one who has placed greater successful intent and effort into curating one’s look should provide greater artistic coherence, so as to convey beauty.

And what better way to convey taste than through one’s fashion, a manifest performance of one’s knowledge of what is fashionable and what is not. Of course, performance here harkens back to our ultimate initial concept: a form of intentional impression management. In fact, taste is one of the highest forms of performance, in that it represents a higher order of associative fashion. Whereas one can choose to wear a suit to curry favor among businessmen, one’s ability to select the right suit brands and effortlessly match one’s suit with other pieces (e.g., watch) requires a higher order of curatorial intentionality. Therefore, whereas one who wishes to associate with a group can simply wear a suit, one who wishes to gain the highest level of trust should select the right suit, given the country and season, and pair it with the right watch.

Of course, one’s intentionality in taste-making could differ. Taste goes beyond performance, in that one strives for beauty, too. Nonetheless, taste possesses a potent performative power in its ability to build credibility and trust. Whether one is or is not concerned with this performative power in social interactions will not change one’s ability to influence situational definitions in social interactions. And to be sure, those who are concerned with this performative power can wield it to ensure maximum cooperative intent from all parties.

There is so much more that I would love to say regarding performativity (e.g., Foucault’s concept of discourse as applied to fashion). However, the primary point that I have defended here is that performativity is integral to society, for it is through performativity that we learn to trust one another to cooperate. Fashion provides the most perceptible manifestation of performativity, as it dominates our strongest sense of vision. Therefore, one’s ability to curate fashion tastefully is of utmost importance to influencing social interactions, enabling taste to take an important stage in power in modern society.

I must note that the implication that I think to be important here is not that of the necessity of performativity in society — this is more a metaphysical point, as all societal interactions must be conducted through performance. The more monumental implication is that performativity plays a pivotal role in society regardless of its metaphysical nature. Because of its prowess, it has evolved into a role beyond one of mere definition, but one of influence. That is, people are able to convey all variations of cooperative intent through all variations of performance, the extent of which is controlled by taste (in fashion). Whether such performance is in conflict with one’s authenticity is a discussion for another time.

Bibliography

• Barthes, Roland. Dandyism and Fashion. Translated work. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

• Barthes, Roland. The Language of Fashion. Translated by Andy Stafford. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

• Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

• Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

• Riley, John G. “Multi-Round Games.” University of California, Los Angeles. Accessed January 29, 2026. http://www.econ.ucla.edu/riley/106P/GAMES/Multi-roundGames.pdf.

• Rocamora, Agnès. Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists. London: I.B. Tauris, 2016.

Evan Bimaputra is particularly fascinated by the intersection of philosophy and culture. With a formal education in philosophy, a sideline as a fledgling disc-jockey, and a childhood steeped in the Internet, he is preoccupied with tracing the cultural currents of his Gen Z peers against the long shadow of classical philosophical thought. Offline, you can find him playing at chess clubs or munching at NYC’s many KBBQ joints.

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In an overgrown meadow, off the pockmarked road, a mile north of the village of Žmoniai, Samogitia region, Lithuania, rests a lonely pile of stones. The steely sky is its only witness and chill breeze its only visitor. Even the local youth who occupy unused spaces at night to escape their parents for a secret drink steer clear of that particular meadow. If you ask them why, they will give different answers, products of active minds and limited knowledge. But those few bedridden elderly who in demented daydreams still remember the days of the Activists and the Partisans — the oldest and most decrepit villagers — know what that meadow is. Before its stones were harvested to pave the road that passes by it, and before no one remained to upkeep it, that meadow was the site of the Žmoniai Jewish Cemetery.

There are no Jews living in Žmoniai today. The last ones met their leaden fate in a nearby forest in September 1941 and never made it to a proper burial. But since the days of the hospitable Duke Gediminas, until his warmth was revoked by his descendants, there had been. And so, for hundreds of years, any Jew who died in that small town would come to occupy that cemetery. Saints and sinners, tailors and blacksmiths, infants who never received names and even the great Rabbi Sleyma, author of a Talmudic commentary, are resting there awaiting the final Redemption. Their souls long whisked off to the Next World, their bodies remain beneath the swaying grasses as the last remnant of Jacob in Žmoniai.

Since no one was left who would have complained, shortly after the War ended and long-coated commissars plundered the wounded land, the inscribed stones that marked the names and locations of the cemetery’s inhabitants were repurposed for proletarian ends. Today cars limp and sputter between Žmoniai and Pašvitinys and, in some of the potholes where the asphalt has weathered off, a reader of Hebrew can spot a name or a date or a prayer that someone’s soul be bound up in the bundle of life.

But some souls do not merit such prayers or intricately carved and polished stones. Thieves and murderers, suicides and the scandalous are not buried with the community’s upstanding members. Their graves are not embellished and, but for a reluctant obligation to bury them by Moses’ law, their bodies would have been left out for the dogs and the birds of prey. The stones in the outcast section, some yards away from the graves of the respected, were too small and fragile to pave a road with. So Žmoniai’s occupiers had left them in a messy pile in the cemetery, which was then abandoned and left to overgrow.

No one has bothered to inspect the pile since then, but if someone had, they would find some stones blank and nameless, some with a name and little else, and one with the Biblical inscription “And I find the woman more bitter than death.” Her name is not recorded, nor how she earned such a stone, but she is why the townspeople avoid that meadow, whether they realize it or not.

Nechama-Reyzl was a beggar. Her life was short and marked by privation and disease. She had grown up an orphan and been widowed soon after her marriage to a consumptive. He had left her little in the way of money and she lived in a homemade shack on community funds. Since those were insufficient, she often found herself sitting in front of the synagogue asking for donations. Few gave. But she had one joy in life, her son Zalman. While she would be outside begging, nine year old Zalman would be inside the synagogue poring over holy books that men many times his age struggled to read. She would send him to Yeshiva and he would become a scholar. Lacking this world, she and her son would at least claim the next.

But one day Zalman disappeared. He was supposed to return home for their meager dinner after evening prayers, but he was not seen in the crowd of men leaving the synagogue and, in fact, had not even shown up. She ran through the streets shouting his name frantically, knocking on every door and asking for him from everyone who crossed her path. Some townspeople avoided her pleading eyes and looked away, while some gazed on her with pity, because even though they had not witnessed it, they knew what had happened to him and that he would not be returning.

In those days, the Russian Czar ruled over Lithuania and her Jews. He did not like that there was a large minority who did not worship the same god as he and whose loyalty was questionable. So he resolved to make good Russians out of them. He demanded a quota from the Jewish communities in his realm of young boys to be sent off to military barracks deep inside the empire to be re-educated in the ways of Russianness and Christianity. Upon reaching adulthood, those children would be conscripted to serve in the military for decades. Since no Jewish parent would volunteer their child for this risky and hostile endeavor, Jewish communities responded by hiring kidnappers to steal them. Rich families could bribe their way out of being targeted, but Nechama-Reyzl was anything but rich. Her youthful scholar would be fed swine and preached the Gospel and beaten if he refused to accept it. She would never see him again. And once she realized it herself, her fear turned to rage.

She knew who the kidnapper was. Everyone in town did. She had watched Avrom, always an undisciplined and rowdy youth, grow from street thug and petty criminal to enforcer of the community’s decree. Not that he was ever a pious, community-oriented man. He was unmarried, but a regular stream of peasant girls flowed in and out of his house. For anyone else that would have been an unforgivable scandal, but Avrom was a source of loathsome fear to the Jews of Žmoniai. His violent nature and connections to the authorities meant anyone who crossed him could end up imprisoned or worse. The townspeople treated him with a distant and begrudging respect, and someone with corrupt business to achieve might secretly pay him to facilitate it.

But Nechama-Reyzl was not afraid of him or anything he could do. He had already taken the thing she valued most in life and, as far as she was concerned, nothing worse could happen to her. A few nights later, she snuck into Avrom’s house while he was sleeping and ended his life with a kitchen knife. She fled into the woods outside of town and hid out, wrapped in blankets.

When morning dawned and Avrom’s fate was noticed, the town was abuzz. Everyone had hated him; he had been responsible for much communal misfortune and grief. But due to his connections, despite his lifestyle and deeds, Avrom was given a stately funeral, funded by the wealthier members of the community. Men prayed and women wailed as they accompanied him to his final resting place. Community leaders vowed to find the culprit for his murder, but he had had so many enemies it was unclear who exactly that was.

A few had noticed Nechama-Reyzl’s absence from her usual begging spot in front of the synagogue, but the rumor mill had decided she had run away to look for her son, and anyway that frail woman would be the last person they would pin a murder on. Every so often, a chicken or a few potatoes would go missing from one household or another in the village, but she was not caught and her forest hideout remained undisturbed.

But her anger did not subside. After all, Avrom had merely acted on orders from the community leaders, frightened that their own children might be demanded instead. Is the true villain the spear or its wielders? When, in the days of the Prophets, the Almighty poured out His wrath on the sinners of Israel, did He limit His punishment to one or two offenders or did He upend the entire society? And so, Nechama-Reyzl resolved to remove anyone and everyone who would have Jewish children be taken and shipped off to uncertain and dangerous fates.

She could not touch the heavily armed Russian officials who had implemented those policies, so she focused on the community leaders who carried them out. The first to fall was Zkharyeh, the head of the Kahal. It was he that had given the dirty money to Avrom in exchange for her child’s future. One morning, his wife woke up drenched in his blood and her screams rang out from one end of the village to the other. Townsfolk gathered and gawked. They rushed to her aid and whispered to each other their theories of who and how.

They remembered what had happened to Avrom. But Avrom had been a thug with many enemies, while Zkharyeh was a beloved societal pillar. He had probably run afoul of the authorities for his selfless devotion to the Jewish community and they had sent an assassin after him. Yes, that was it! Clearly Vanya was trying to stick his hand in their pockets by removing their leader and protector. What a holy martyr!

Nechama-Reyzl watched the funeral from afar and took note of who attended. All those good Jews who could not spare a kopeck for her in her begging days but had gleefully allowed her only child to be taken instead of their own. She hated every one of them and their false innocence. Their families and lives that came at the cost of hers. Their new clothes while she wore rags. Their future while she had none. She watched them lower Zkharyeh into the ground and resolved to have them join him.

A few more incidents and the community noticed a trend. Someone was hunting them. Heavy locks sprouted on doors and prayers in the synagogue became more heartfelt. The larger men among them stayed out all night looking for offenders and watched the entrances to the town. Two Lithuanians, Joris and Evaldas, were hired to comb the surrounding fields and forests with rifles looking for anything amiss. Three days later they brought back a small woman’s emaciated body and a long knife.

Nechama-Reyzl was buried the next day without much fanfare. The mystery was solved and the curse had been lifted. The poor woman had clearly been driven mad by the loss of her son and the townsfolk discussed her with more pity than anger. Over time, her memory faded, save for the occasional warning from a parent to a child to behave or “the beggar will get you” and a newfound fear among the Lithuanians to enter her resting place, lest her restless spirit take revenge for Joris and Evaldas. Besides that, all that remained of her was a stone in the cemetery the community had erected to condemn her deeds, inscribed “And I find the woman more bitter than death.”

Author’s Afterword

1.) To what degree is the collective obligated to consider the needs of the individual? Nechama-Reyzl was a recipient of the charity of the community and considered the community obligated to help and support her. This meshes with traditional Jewish values surrounding charity that she expected the community to uphold, an obligation they fell short of, in her view.

2.) To what degree should the collective sacrifice the individual for its own sake? When faced with the threat of having their own children conscripted, the leaders of the community decided to sacrifice someone they viewed as less important. While this is an understandable human impulse, it led historically to much discontent and strife within the communities where the conscription of so-called “cantonists” was imposed and undermined trust in the communal authorities (the “Kahal”) as legitimate political bodies. They were mostly abolished after 1844.

3.) To what degree should the individual assert himself over the collective that considers its needs over his? Although the community viewed her and her son as disposable, Nechama-Reyzl herself was highly sensitive to the injustice that had been performed on her and decided to take the law into her own hands. At first she targeted the specific people endangering the children of the community, but eventually became more indiscriminate as resentment took over. What should she have done?

4.) To what degree should nations attempt to assimilate minorities and how? While, to a modern eye, the idea of conscripting children by kidnapping seems heavy-handed, to say the least, it stemmed from an anxiety on the part of the governmental authorities that still exists in some form today with various subjects. To what degree should minorities and immigrants be expected to assimilate into the mainstream culture? Is some degree of assimilation necessary for a nation’s social cohesion? How much? And by what methods should that assimilation be encouraged, if any?

5.) To what degree should minority communities assimilate into the mainstream? To most of the Jewish community of the early 19th century Russian Empire where the story takes place, the idea of assimilating into the Russian culture was viewed as sacrilegious and catastrophic, due surely in no small part to some of the unpopular methods used by the authorities to encourage that. In the German lands, meanwhile, many local Jews, influenced by Enlightenment ideas, viewed assimilation into German culture as desirable. Later on, various approaches would develop in various places regarding to what degree it is desirable to join other cultures and to what degree to keep one’s own, a debate that continues to this day, both in Jewish and in other communities.

6.) Does respect for the memory of people who are no longer around trump practical concerns of the present day? After the widespread destruction of World War Two had finished, many gravestones across Eastern Europe were repurposed as building materials. Was that the right thing to do?

7.) How should a community treat scandalous behavior? The scathing rebuke etched into Nechama-Reyzl’s headstone is based on a real epitaph in the Jewish cemetery of Gibraltar. Until very recently, it was a widely accepted custom that society needed to make an example of scandalous people even after death. This typically included cases of suicide, a behavior that many nowadays consider a guiltless expression of uncontrollable mental illness or despair, but back then was viewed as a crime akin to murder. Were the people of previous eras too harsh or are we too soft? Do we encourage problematic behavior by deproblematizing it or is empathy always the solution?

Ben G. is a frequent Philosophy Club attendee and native New Yorker. This story was inspired by a recent trip to Lithuania.

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Facets of Science

It’s difficult to overstate how much more we now know about the natural world compared to people living just a few hundred years ago. At our fingertips everyday we unthinkingly harness what to our not-too-distant ancestors would be considered extraordinary wizardry.

For example, if you gave a Renaissance-era engineer the complete schematics for an air conditioner, they would still be amazed at the result. The reason is because modern air conditioners rely on the fact that when a gas is compressed, its pressure and temperature rise, and when it’s allowed to expand, its pressure and temperature drop. By controlling where in the process gasses are pressurized, air conditioners are able to blow cool air into your room. However, it was only in the late 18th century that we discovered this lawful relationship between pressure and temperature, which is now taken as a given in air conditioner manufacturing.

This is but one of thousands of discoveries whose effects have filtered into our daily lives. We live as kings, not recognizing what precious luxuries we’ve been afforded. With phones, we can instantaneously communicate with people on the other side of the planet. With vaccines, we’re able to prevent illnesses that historically decimated entire societies. With lightbulbs, we can banish the darkness for less than one five thousandth of what it cost just 300 years ago.

How has all this been possible? In a word, science.

It was not beseeching divine revelation. Not politicking. Not war and conquest. Not shaking a magic eight ball. All this we’ve been doing, mostly to no avail, for hundreds of thousands of years. (Well, maybe not the last one.) No, the revolution in our understanding of the natural world comes down to something more recent. It was a change in how we ask and answer questions, what we now call “science.”

There is, of course, no consensus definition of “science,” but we can make headway in describing its contours nonetheless. There is a set of values that scientists collectively embody that helps to explain the remarkable strides we’ve made in revealing nature’s secrets. Here, I’ll describe three of these values: curiosity, skepticism of authority, and responsiveness to evidence. I will also describe examples of scientists failing to live up to these values and explain how they threaten to undermine the progress we’ve enjoyed so far.

1. Curiosity

Curiosity is the desire to better understand the world. Where there is a blank spot on our map, curiosity is what propels us to explore. When a gap in our understanding appears, the curious seek an explanation.

However, this is not the only way a person could arrive at their beliefs. We might, for example, be motivated to believe something simply because it makes us feel good. A person who’s just been given a grim medical prognosis might feel some resistance towards the results of their test and continue believing they’re perfectly healthy. Alternatively, we might be motivated to believe something merely because it paints the group we belong to in a positive light (or our enemies in a negative one).

A Case Study:

It’s commonly thought that liberals and conservatives have One Big Thing from which they derive their political beliefs. Perhaps its equality vs hierarchy, change vs preservation, big vs small government, or idealism vs realism.

However, one group of psychologists argues that this is all misguided.The hodgepodge of views that political parties have had across cultures and across history is too heterogeneous to be explained by any single dimension. No, the content of any political group’s beliefs is highly contingent, and most individuals’ political beliefs are highly inconsistent. Moreover, psychological experiments find that individuals’ evaluations of social policies are highly malleable depending on the political group supporting them.

All this is because our political beliefs are best explained, not as deductions from abstract principles, but rather as a means of fitting in with and mobilizing support from potential allies. So for example, feminists today often have views that are congenial to ethnic minorities, but there was nothing inevitable about this. Indeed, feminists of the early 20th century sometimes explicitly excluded African Americans from the suffrage movement.

So it is with political beliefs more broadly. On this Alliance Theory of political beliefs, we should expect people to indulge in biases that flatter their allies and belittle their opponents. The better to recruit people to your side and repulse people from the other.

These tendencies to allow our personal and groupish biases to distort our thinking were what Francis Bacon called the “idol of the cave” and the “idol of the tribe,” respectively. As Bacon put it, the lies we come to as a result of these idols are like candlelight, warm and comforting, yet they pale as substitutes for the search for and knowledge of the truth, that is, the (sometimes unflattering) daylight of reality. When we engage our curiosity, that is what we are motivated by.

Science (when practiced well) channels this curiosity towards advancing our understanding of the natural world. It is in part what led Darwin to voyage on the HMS Beagle and, ultimately, to discover the process of evolution by natural selection. More recently, it was what led Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó, despite decades of obscurity and a threat of deportation, to pioneer the mRNA technology that allowed for the rapid development of COVID vaccines.

However, not everyone has such admirable courage to explore the unknown. Some, in fact, wish to actively discourage certain types of research. For example, on the subject of racial differences in intelligence, philosophers Ned Block and Gerald Dworkin have written:

What we are saying is that at this time, in this country, in this political climate, individual scientists should voluntarily refrain from the investigation of genotypic racial differences in performance on IQ tests.

Indeed, some scholars have been threatened or physically attacked for their views on this subject, and many take Block and Dworkin’s advice for fear of ostracism or retaliation.

Ostensibly, the rationale for these calls for censorship is a concern that the research might be used to justify the oppression of minority groups. However, as researcher Noah Carl argues, this neglects at least two problems.

One is that this censorship may inadvertently reinforce the odious moral views that the censors were fighting in the first place. Now, it’s true that those who wish to oppress minority groups do indeed wish to find genetic differences between the races. But to fight back against such views, it is not necessary to deny genetic differences or stifle research on these differences. Rather, one can instead argue that such differences are not relevant to how we ought to treat one another—the equality of persons and a respect for rights do not depend on people’s genetics. Indeed, those who fear research on genetic differences in abilities are, in effect, holding their morals hostage to the empirical facts. They are implicitly suggesting that oppression would be warranted if differences in mental abilities turned out to have a genetic origin, thus reinforcing the very views they were fighting against.

A second problem Carl notes is that stifling research may lead scholars to misunderstand salient phenomena, thereby leading to material harms. For example, it is now known that there are significant racial differences in the effectiveness and side-effect profiles of clinically important drugs. If, out of concern for minority groups, we deny that races exist or that there are genetic differences between them, we risk providing people with suboptimal medical care, potentially at the cost of people’s lives.

So it goes with censorship more broadly: when people seek to limit the frontiers of knowledge, they often fail to foresee the negative effects of their actions. They may unintentionally bring about the very harms they were concerned about, and they may engender further harms as a result of the ignorance they cultivated. And so even if we might find some line of research personally repugnant, we should be wary of those who would seek to curtail it. As the saying goes, “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” We may yet be surprised by what’s to be discovered by those with opposing views.

And what is it about curiosity that makes it an effective engine of progress? Why can’t we just believe what we (or our tribe) want to believe?

Simply put, we are more likely to find the truth when we actively search for it. When we set ourselves to some other goal, like satisfying the idols of the cave or the tribe, we follow a path that makes true discoveries merely a matter of happenstance, and so it should be no surprise when this path leads us astray. Even worse if we actively shun the truth or punish others who blaspheme our idols.

An analogy: To drive from NYC to LA, it is very useful to actually try to drive to LA. Driving to some other random spot on the map or closing our eyes entirely is unlikely to get us to LA, since the large majority of other paths do not pass through that destination.

So it is with scientific discoveries as well. To better understand the natural world, it is incredibly useful to actually try to understand it. You have the option of shaking a magic eight ball if it makes you feel good, but then you should not expect to be the next Darwin or Karikó. To create a good map of the world, you must explore the terrain, not draw whatever you wish in the blank spaces.

2. Skepticism of Authority

The motto for the Royal Society, the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world, is “Nullius in verba,” meaning “Take nobody’s word for it.” It embodies an attitude of skepticism towards authority that makes science distinct from other ways of learning about the world.

Of course, it does not mean that scientists never rely on others. Scientists are not solipsists. They collaborate with each other and cite each others’ work all the time. Science is, after all, fundamentally a social enterprise. As Isaac Newton put it, he was only able to see further than others “by standing on the shoulders of giants.” And so it is with every scientist.

Yet there is still an important sense in which scientists engage in a skepticism that goes beyond what might be ordinarily practiced. For example, for thousands of years it was common for scholars to cite Aristotle as the definitive authority on how the world works. He was so central a figure in the academy that the 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas cited him simply as “The Philosopher.” It was precisely this attitude that Galileo mocked when he described one scholar as staying “so closely tied to every phrase of Aristotle’s as to hold it sacrilege to depart from a single one of them.”

More broadly, the impulse to sacralize certain ideas has been a common one throughout history, especially in religious contexts. Catholics, for example, trust the Pope to be infallible on matters of doctrine. Muslims take the Quran to be free of error, and Hindus treat the Vedas similarly. This is not a scientific attitude.

Science (when practiced well) treats all claims as worthy of critical scrutiny. No inquiry is to be taken as sacrilegious. No authority is to be taken as infallible. In many ways, skepticism is the norm:

1. Empirical testing: Scientists are not in the habit of merely making pronouncements about the world. In the ordinary course of their work, scientists must present data or arguments to support their claims, else they lose the esteem of their peers. And when a scientist sticks their neck out and conducts an experiment that has a high chance of ruling out false hypotheses, this is seen as especially valuable. To pass through a “severe” test with one’s neck unscathed is considered a great feat in science.

2. Peer review: Scientists submit their work to journals, and this work is then critically evaluated by their peers. In the most prestigious journals, it is extremely common for a paper to be rejected. For example, the rejection rate for Nature, one of the world’s leading science journals, is about 92%.

3. Replication: Even after a study has been conducted, passed through peer-review, and published in a journal, scientists might nonetheless express skepticism. They might be so skeptical that they attempt to redo the entire study themselves just to make sure the results were correct. In science, this effort is to be welcomed, not scorned.

By way of contrast, consider an exchange between psychologists Scott Lilienfeld and Derald Wing Sue. In a 2017 article Lilienfeld argued that research on “microaggressions” was beset with a number of conceptual and methodological problems, and as such its application in real-world contexts like diversity and cultural sensitivity trainings was premature. In response, Sue did not challenge the merit of any of Lilienfeld’s arguments. Rather, he challenged the value of science more broadly:

In essence, Lilienfeld is applying the accepted scientific principle of skepticism to the study of microaggressions, which may unintentionally dilute, dismiss, and negate the lived experience of marginalized groups in our society.

In effect, Sue was treating the testimony of these marginalized groups as beyond skepticism. To do otherwise, would be “problematic.”

However, Sue’s response does not appear to demonstrate an understanding of why skepticism of authority is such an important part of science.

It’s because humans—including members of marginalized groups—are fallible, finite beings!

When we attach our own beliefs so thoroughly to a particular individual or group, we risk adopting the exact same mistakes they made in the course of their investigations. And it is inevitable that they made mistakes; no one is so wise and so rational that they can avoid all humanity’s biases. Even the great Aristotle made mistakes, for example, believing that there was a hierarchy of nature with humans at the top and other life forms below. It was not until Darwin’s time that we learned to view life rather as a branching tree (or perhaps bush), with no species inhabiting a privileged position at the top.

Moreover, even the most perspicuous humans live finite lives. This fundamental limitation prevents any individual from discovering the secrets to everything; all investigations must at some point end. So it is upon us, the living, to take their work and build on it (or perhaps demolish it) with the new information we gather about the natural world. Collectively, humanity does not have to put down the scientific instruments after 60 or so years. We can continue to make progress in understanding the world far after the end of any individual’s career.

3. Responsiveness to Evidence

The final distinctive characteristic of science is responsiveness to evidence. Just as a good thermometer’s reading will rise or fall in response to the temperature around it, so too, a good scientist’s confidence in their hypothesis will rise or fall in response to the evidence they encounter. Two points are worth emphasizing here.

The first is responsiveness. Humans often have a tendency to act defensive about their beliefs. When encountering contradictory evidence we flinch away as though it would hurt us. Scientists are trained (albeit imperfectly) to make the opposite motion, to embrace the results of their experiments whatever they may be. Charles Darwin neatly expressed this sentiment in his autobiography: “I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”

Relinquishing one’s old beliefs, however, can be difficult. There is always the temptation to massage one’s data in a way that leads to congenial conclusions, which is why many scientists have sought a way of ensuring that they respond appropriately to the evidence. Thus, many scientific journals have begun accepting “registered reports.”

The idea is simple: Scientists submit their study rationale, design, and proposed analyses for peer review prior to conducting their study. Once approved, journals commit to publishing the study regardless of the results, so long as the scientists follow their submitted protocol. As a consequence, scientists can rest easy knowing that they’ll be recognized for their contributions, thus mitigating the incentive to engage in selective reporting of their data. Moreover, by requiring that scientists follow their protocols, registered reports act as a formal safeguard against this selective reporting. Scientists cannot fish around for the one analysis among dozens that favors their hypothesis; rather, they must call it as they see it (or as they saw it in their initial protocol).

The second point to emphasize is evidence. Evidence is not the only thing that might change a person’s beliefs. We might instead adhere to beliefs because we think they’re the kind of beliefs good people hold. Consider, for example, the case of Howard Gardner, the originator of the concept of multiple intelligences. In a lecture explaining his perspective Gardner says:

Even if...the bad guys [who emphasize the importance of IQ] turn out to be more correct scientifically than I am, life is short, and we have to make choices about how we spend our time. And that’s where I think the multiple intelligences way of thinking about things will continue to be useful even if the scientific evidence doesn’t support it.

He is, in essence, admitting that he will continue to champion multiple intelligences come what may, regardless of the scientific evidence. What’s more, he casts his colleagues, those who don’t believe in his theory, as “the bad guys.”

This is the voice of an ideologue, so committed to his theory that he’s given up on science. A good scientist, by contrast, follows the evidence wherever it leads. When the truth happens to contradict their beliefs, so much the worse for their beliefs; it’s time to change them.

An analogy: If you’re driving with a GPS and it tells you a bridge is closed, it behooves you to change directions. You should not continue on towards the bridge heedless of the new evidence you’ve received.

So, too, in science it is immensely important to respond to the evidence. To do otherwise risks driving off a metaphorical bridge, i.e. dedicating your life championing a false theory. If we instead update our beliefs accordingly, we are much more likely to converge towards theories that reliably stand up to scrutiny. And from this foundation, we might build vast edifices that ultimately benefit mankind. We can, for example, build literal bridges that span 100+ miles by combining together our understanding of materials science, geology, hydrology, physics, and more.

A Caveat:

The above discussion presents a somewhat idealized view of science. It is true that scientists will tend to value curiosity, skepticism of authority, and responsiveness to evidence. In practice, however, scientists also frequently fail to live up to these values.

For example, in an infamous leaked draft of a 2016 essay, Susan Fiske—prior president of the Association for Psychological Science—described those who had criticized her friends’ research as “destructo-critics” and “methodological terrorists.” Needless to say, this is not a welcoming attitude towards those pointing out errors in science.

More broadly, many fields show signs of bias in their evaluation of research, for example, selectively publishing findings that seemingly support hypotheses but not those that falsify them. And there are yet many ways that scientists could improve in detecting and disincentivizing negligence, hype, or outright fraud.

Nonetheless, it remains the case that science, with all its warts, has been an amazing engine of human progress. And so the appropriate prescription when a scientist fails to live up to the scientific values is not to give up on the values, but rather to reaffirm them and find ways to make them an even more central part of the scientific enterprise.

Conclusion

It is said that the birth of philosophy in Europe started when people eschewed the mytho-religious explanations they were taught. They instead noticed that there was order in the universe and that this order could be explained without recourse to a divinity. As one historian put it, this new beginning “consisted in the abandonment, at the level of conscious thought, of mythological solutions to problems concerning the origin and nature of the universe and the processes that go on within it.” The first generation of philosophers were those brave enough to leave the idols of the cave and tribe and seek the truth for themselves. With their curiosity and skepticism of received wisdom, we might also say they were early harbingers of science too.

It should be no surprise, then, that an earlier name for science was “natural philosophy.” The two fields, science and philosophy, to this day share many of the same values. Where they differ is more a matter of emphasis than substance. Scientists often focus more on empirical observations rather than the analysis of concepts. And whereas many philosophers can do their work from the armchair, many scientists use specialized equipment to take measurements of the natural world.

What’s essential to science though, and what’s made it so beneficial to humanity, has been the values that scientists collectively embody—curiosity, skepticism of authority, and responsiveness to evidence. Curiosity has motivated scientists to explore the unknown, pushing the frontiers of knowledge into regions that would have otherwise been ignored. Skepticism of authority has led scientists to double check those regions that were thought to be certain. Often, this confidence has been unearned, with authorities simply preaching what’s in their own interests, heedless of the truth. Where curiosity generates hypotheses, skepticism tests them. Finally, a good scientist takes the results of these tests to heart. When scientists are responsive to the evidence they ensure that the map reflects the territory, so that the lines they draw are precise and undistorted by personal bias.

These are not the only values scientists hold, but together, they are instrumental to explaining the remarkable progress we’ve made as a species in understanding the natural world.

By Nathan Nguyen

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Existentialism?

What do I know about existentialism?

I’m not some guy who sits around philosophizing in my spare time: thinking about thinking, and so on. I’m an adult! I’ve got serious things to take care of, as well as a cat. So please, don’t bother me with questions of existentialism, or what it all means. I just don’t have the time.

And you... you’re still here?

Incredible!

Look, I’ve gotta go to work, like five minutes ago. But first, a quick coffee stop! And second, the train: which may, if I’m lucky, spark another episode of psychopathic rage as the hellish grind and halting of the MTA parks me somewhere deep underground and surrounded by concrete, alongside my fellow eukaryotes, who (just like me) would rather be anywhere else.

Look at us now: real, bona fide human beans. Packed inside these aluminum tins on electrified rails, like some fucked up Rube Goldburg machine.

I can’t avoid a sense of deja vu. And then it hits me: I’ve once more been caught in the most devious trap imaginable. These bastards have robbed me of my wireless connection to the Internet. Yet again! And I keep letting them get away with it. Now I can’t even listen to music to take my mind off of things. This dull state of frustration has become my life.

Trapped! In the interstitial realm of: ads for shit I don’t need, but now may dream of later; the unintelligible conductor, who sounds like Skrillex, live at Gitmo; followed by the robot’s dulcet tones, whose placid nonexistence just makes it all better, somehow.

I’ve got to get out of here. There’s been a mistake. I’m not meant to be here, now, at this juncture in space and time. Let me out!

Sometimes I see with perfect clarity why folks decide to “make the news”.

The sudden mechanical lurching back to life occurs. Lurch. Stuck...

Times like these, I consider carrying a book. But reading, honestly? Who has the time? And to voluntarily encumber myself with such an egg-headed accoutrement seems... unseemly. Still, among my present company, the ones who seem to be surviving best in our current climate (sans Internet), are those eggheads over there, with their four-eyes and their paperbacks, and - oh, my word - one of them even has a pencil out, taking notes on whatever esoterica his eyes are soaking up.

Curiosity’s got me, now: what’s this book that has him so absorbed? Come on, lift that sucker up a couple inches, so the class can see. And there it is! Just some light reading for the morning ride - good old Durkheim, with his isolation, anomie, and alienation. Now my question becomes: why’s this guy need a book to see what he can live and breathe, just existing in the most affluent city in the world?

Nonetheless, he’s positively riveted. Just look at him: one with the book, one with the train; somebody ought to - I don’t know, yell in his ear about “how much bullshit it is that the goddamn train don’t work like it should”. Oh wait, here we go... it’s happening, right on queue. And he doesn’t even blink! No startle response, no reaction, at all. Incredible. He just turned the page and kept right on... reading. He can’t keep getting away with it!

Upon reflection, (contemplating my image in the dark glass opposite,) I realize it’s probably unrealistic, not to mention unhealthy, to continually ascribe these conspiratorial intentions to the MTA, strangers on the train, etc. Better to take stock of things I can control, rather than getting all wound up by stuff I can’t.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t be in this position to ruminate if I had my way. Previously, I would have taken my trusty ebike to get to work. But that old routine ended completely one dreary autumn afternoon last year. I got T-boned right off that bike by a lovely little Subaru whose brakes didn’t quite stick the landing on the slick pavement after the day’s rain.

It happened, no kidding, like this: “Oh, shit,” - bonk - hey, that’s me: laying there in the intersection, gray sky and strangers’ faces in view. “That could have been worse,” was my first thought, on coming back to consciousness. Hurt to breathe in. Wow, what the fuck? At least my skull was intact.

Here’s the part that I actually find interesting, though:

Where had “I” gone for those few moments in between getting hit, and then suddenly “coming back” into existence? It’s curious to me that one moment I was “here,” as an active perceiver of the world we share, and the next I was “gone” without even realizing my departure had taken place. Only upon “returning” was I able to put together a narrative regarding this brief jaunt into and out of the darkness. And with time, reflect on it.

Something like one in seven people who come close to death see the bright light, chit-chat with a dead family member, have their life flash before them, or float around in an out-of-body experience, etc. I didn’t get any of that; but my incident, for reasons that will become clear below, was sufficient on its own. In short, what I gathered from it was that you’re either here or you’re not, and it’s just a light switch away from clicking your brain off without any epilogue, denouement, or otherwise long goodbye.

So, that’s the rub. I got caught out rushing home to better myself professionally, to hit the books after another day of dragging my carcass through one more shift at the old dead-end job. And - wham-bam - would you believe it: laid out cold, with a short stint at the ICU, major rib surgery, and all that jazz, as you can imagine. (They gave me four titanium plates, so that’s fun.)

Like most people who come close to dying (“You’re lucky to be alive,” said the doc,) I have found that I’m actually quite happy to still be here (“And you’re going to make a full recovery”).

Which is still funny to me, about a year later. Because for a long time I didn’t really want to do it anymore. Go on with the whole “being alive” thing, I mean. You see, I’ve had the distinct displeasure to develop and retain chronic back pain since the age of twenty-four (that’s nearly ten years, as of writing); it even radiates in all kinds of fun ways throughout my lower body most days.

So, I’m not just bullshitting you when I say “Oh wow, it’s nice not to have died!” I can absolutely contextualize what it means to enjoy life; the present moment; and a notion of the future, after not having the physical capacity to relax, be at ease in the “now,” and look forward to anything. It all seemed like a dark tunnel without end.

So many times, I flirted with just throwing it all away: most visibly, with speed. That antithesis of the dead-stop which finally got me to take stock of things.

Zipping along crazily, hazarding life in another brain-dead weave through a red light, looking both ways just enough to yell “fuck you” to whoever was crossing my way, before laughing hysterically at whatever response they gave. Probably pissed because I’d cut clear cross their path, made them scared and snap back to the road instead of their phone. I just didn’t care. It hurt to exist, if you can grasp that. Never at ease. Unable to relate. Physically in pain in so many ways, and just expected to accept it and manage it and move on as best as one can.

It could always be worse though, right? To drag in Sisyphus and his myth: one could glamorize the pain, mythologizing how it’s played out over time, and say “Oh, you know, it’s my cross to bear”, and so on. But long-suffering is itself insufferable. It’s bad enough to have the pain. Why make a show of it? This only distorts the space between you and others more. To identify with the symptom rather than the struggle is anathema. And if you aren’t pushing back against the problem, well then, “lie down and die?” You can thank Camus for that one. But just to see what happened next, I thought I’d stick it out.

Still, I was terrified of living the rest of my life this way, and saw no hope in connecting with human beings ever again. It’s not like I didn’t try everything under the sun, either. I had. And it sucked beyond words to have all that not be enough. So, I found some sublimation through aggressively riding my bike to and from work in the most dangerous ways. It hurt to ride, too, which just spiked every kind of negativity in me. Somewhat masochistically, I referred to my bike as “the pain machine”.

Which is how I reached the conclusion that purchasing a 70-pound ebike with fat tires, cruiser bars, and a split-cheek seat would be just the thing for me. Ergonomics, baby! Inescapable; a lifestyle, even. And it was a glorious ride - for about a year, until the accident happened.

The ebike is still fine, don’t worry. But I never have a reason to ride anymore. I’m not traumatised, I swear! I’ve even ridden a citibike (unfortunately) twice since then. It’s just that my work sites these days are either near enough to walk, or far enough to require the train. Which is another thing that changed, since getting hit: my line of work. I don’t feel such crushing despair due to working a dead-end job anymore.

Something else different: these days my chronic back pain, remarkably untouched by that Subaru or wet concrete, feels manageable, though never fully absent. Perhaps nothing changed physically under the skin (save a little titanium, however that’s out of the way, in the ribs), but my outlook on “now,” and “the future” has certainly shifted, to the point where I know I can sustain this forward momentum I seem to have fallen into.

Living in the moment no longer feels impossible; nor do I find it inconceivable to imagine the future as something worth living for. And I find it easier to laugh off inconveniences: the alternative to being here, dealing with this annoying, quotidian surprise (pick one) is to not be here at all! And that makes me laugh. It’s a relief to experience this point of view, after the preceding long, dark tunnel of despair.

All this to say: the eggheads would go on about “the dark night of the soul.” For my part, sometimes I brush up against other people who have been through something which marked them indelibly, which they’ve since absorbed, processed, and sublimated - whatever “it” was they went through during that night, or in that tunnel, it no longer weighs them down, but rather buoys them up whenever the lights go out or the train gets stuck somewhere deep underground.

Because “it could always be worse,” right?

To attempt to wind this diatribe down: it’s not enough to just go through something arduous. People have all kinds of responses to trauma, whether it’s long and drawn out, or short and sharply acute. In my experience, Viktor Frankl is right in saying the two things that help most of all in passing through great difficulties are: 1) meaningful interpersonal relationships, and 2) personal goals as of yet unfulfilled.

The latter is why I laugh at the thought of (alternatively) just not being here, in lieu of having to deal with bullshit: it’s because I get the chance to fulfill my own goals still, that I am incidentally dealing with some annoyances along the way.

And the former is the real reason why my pain decreased: I found love! Is it any wonder why they write all those songs, shows, and poems about it? As a chemical cocktail released and exchanged between the brain and the (rest of the) body, love soothes all aches from a system otherwise chronically in fight-or-flight; it’s the best medicine. No kidding; who knew? It’s the most damnable thing, but true.

These things (forms of love) require no explanation. It is wonderful to be cared for, and it is equally wonderful to sincerely give care. People who love you do this little thing called “showing up” when you’re in need, and sometimes you can’t help but do the same thing for somebody else.

That’s the part that got me, on the far end of my fall; afterwards, I would keep showing up for somebody I had discovered I loved. Because hey, the sensation made me feel good. More than good, actually: great! I mean, my chronic back pain went away. Disappeared: gone. Which obviously, was huge for me. Life-changing.

We two were inseparable: it was the best feeling, to be truly seen and heard; to deeply understand one another with bilateral trust that ran through each day and hour; this subconscious rhythm we had developed in tandem. It was the greatest expansion of my understanding of what it means to be truly alive during our limited time here.

A few months later, while moving out of New York, this individual left me with the words: “I just liked playing with your heart.”

Now, in classic egghead fashion, Marcus Aurelius, that Stoic of yore, advises us that an individual’s most critical mission is not to fall into a state of such alienation from one’s fellow humans that connecting with others feels impossible.

Through loving another, I had overcome the most terrible aspect of my chronic pain, which was the inhuman condition of isolation I felt it imposed upon me. And though ultimately love in this instance wasn’t enduring (or, actually, bilateral), it was enough to expand my horizon beyond the myopic worldview that chronic pain can create over time, hemming one in and blinding one to all that is good and attainable beyond just getting through this unpleasant moment.

Because there is physical pain that persists; then there is the emotional pain of knowing the missed opportunities this creates; and finally there is the mental anguish of projecting both of these states into the future indefinitely, seeing only these barriers again and again across every possible fork in the road.

So I will take your time, here at the end, to invoke the age-old, hackneyed answer of love. Though one can’t wake up in the morning and decide “today, I’m going to walk out that door, perhaps get stuck on the morning train, but definitely, certainly, find love in the afternoon, or the evening, at latest.”

Still, if you can find it...

Stephen Campbell holds a degree in History from the University of Mary Washington. He enjoys car culture, advertising, and the MTA. His favorite pastimes are magical thinking and shower singing, particularly “Jesus Take the Wheel”.

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I. Introduction

The profound impact of artificial intelligence, and particularly the meteoric rise of generative AI, is undeniable. The immense potential and poignant drawbacks have sparked intense debate. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT offer anyone an instant consultant, brainstorming partner, translator, creative assistant, or even technical expertise. Similarly, image and video generation models accelerate concept creation and democratize graphic design. Yet, despite these clear advantages, a deep skepticism persists around the technology. This is, in part, due to the many well-founded ethical, economic, and political concerns. However, there exists a more fundamental aversion that lies beneath these practical objections: a core human preference for reality and resistance to simulation.

The fault of AI lies in its fundamental separation from reality, in its lack of experience, conscious intent, and human authorship. An AI-generated poem, though grammatically flawless, is not produced from a history of suffering, joy, or memories, but from statistical correlations in human language. An aesthetically pleasing AI image is not the result of an artist’s encounter with the world but of a system recombining patterns it can never experience firsthand. These models do not participate in reality, they operate on representations of it, generating new symbols from prior symbols. By simulating a reality they cannot inhabit, AI systems lack something fundamental to that reality. This loss exists in spite of, not because of, the technology’s practical shortcomings.

AI provides us with a distinct, modern example of the preference we have against simulation or toward reality. However, there exist many other areas of modern life, from consumer habits to interpersonal relationships, which can be similarly described as simulation. This article argues that the unease surrounding generative AI is analogous to a deeper human preference for reality, and that comparing AI within Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra shows why our scrutiny of this new technology must extend beyond AI systems to the many other forms of simulations that mediate everyday life.

II. Preference Toward Reality / Aversion to the Unreal:

The human inclination towards ‘the real’ is not unique to the domain of AI. This phenomenon is evident in our consumer habits, social attitudes, and is explored in works of popular fiction and philosophy. Food companies, for instance, use phrases like “made with real fruit” to distinguish their product from products that may use artificial flavors. There are strict rules that govern such labels because of the allure this ‘realness’ has on consumers. In Japan, for example, manufacturers cannot depict realistic fruit on their packaging unless the percentage of fruit juice is above a certain level. This illustrates that even the suggestion of a real fruit can meaningfully influence a buyer.

The diamond market isolates the quality of ‘realness’ from other desirable traits, like nutrition in the case of food items. Lab-grown diamonds typically fetch dramatically lower prices than similar natural ones, despite being chemically and structurally identical. What, then, gives the natural diamond its added value? In this case, it is nothing but the knowledge of its authenticity. There is no experiential difference to the unaided senses, only an understanding of the origin and that it formed through natural processes. This information does not manifest physically in any obvious way; it takes a trained eye and special tools to discern the difference. It is this perceived “realness,” that is grounded in knowledge rather than experience, that grants the natural diamond its elevated worth.

This preference for the real, even at the expense of other desires, is explored through major philosophical and fictional narratives. The Experience Machine is a thought experiment introduced by Robert Nozick in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia.1 He imagines a machine that can allow humans to exist in a perfect and absolute state of pleasure. He then asks, if given the choice, would anyone willingly subject themselves to this machine? A similar idea is explored in Aldous Huxley’s book A Brave New World.2 In this novel, Huxley writes of a society that is kept perpetually content through a drug called soma. While the Experience Machine was originally an argument against hedonism and A Brave New World is a cautionary tale about the sacrifice of freedom, they both also confront the conflict between reality and simulation. On the surface, the simulated lives they offer are enticing, but the idea that this happiness is only a simulation must be grappled with. In both cases, the simulated existence is, by definition, more pleasurable than reality, yet something is still missing. When the choice is between perfect pleasure and the real world, many hesitate to abandon the real in favor of the simulation. We are drawn to whatever it is that the simulation lacks and would prefer a less pleasurable existence if it meant a real existence.

This idea of choice between reality and simulation is perfectly encapsulated in the 1999 film The Matrix.3 In this movie, the main character, Neo, discovers that the world he and all other humans inhabit is an elaborate computer simulation being run in their minds. The humans still exist in the real world as inert power sources for the machines which now dominate it. The Earth is depicted as a post-apocalyptic hellscape where the sun has been blocked out and the land is now covered in a mechanical network entirely hostile to human life. Despite this, when given the choice to return to blissful ignorance and live in the relatively pleasant simulation or escape into the brutal hell that is the real world, Neo chooses the real.

III. Baudrillard’s Hyperreal: The Precession of Simulacra

The Matrix was inspired by the book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard,4 a French sociologist and philosopher. Through this book and many of his other works, he explores the idea of reality and specifically how our modern world differs from it. He claims that the media-centric world we live in has become composed mostly, if not entirely, of simulations and that almost all of the signs and symbols we interact with are mere simulacra: copies of something which do not, or no longer, exist.

This idea stems from the fact that all media are, by nature, representational. When trying to capture or recreate a real event, the creator will inevitably have to make judgments or interpretations. A photo is always taken at a certain angle, a news story must always summarize details, and an author always has a bias. The creator, even when attempting to be genuine, can do no more than simulate their experience. In a media‑saturated society, these simulations increasingly mediate our contact with the world, so that our worldview is formed more by representations than by direct encounters. Over time, the media, symbols, and culture we create rest on layers of prior representations instead of on any stable underlying reality. For Baudrillard, this is the crucial shift. The copy no longer follows the real but precedes it, so that simulations come to define what counts as reality in the first place. In this state of “hyperreality,” the representations do not just reflect the world, they become more real for us than whatever they were supposed to depict.

Society is built upon these layers of interpretation. Our ideas, products, desires, and cultural norms result from this precession of simulating the simulated. In a modern sense, this can be seen through social media. A young person might build their personality and interests to imitate their favorite online influencer. The influencer, of course, carefully curates their online image to represent themselves exactly as they want, often driven by a desire to maximize engagement which itself is guided by recommendation algorithms. The young person imitates the distorted image of the real person, who themselves distorts their image to conform to algorithms driven by a simulation of the consumer’s desire. Each layer symbolizes the next. This, however, becomes the young person’s reality. Through this imitation, they have become a simulacrum, a copy of that which does not exist.

Baudrillard describes this precession of simulation into simulacra as consisting of four stages:

1. Copy (The Sacramental Order): A faithful symbol of the real.

2. Distortion (The Order of Malefice): A symbol that masks or interprets reality.

3. Deception (The Order of Sorcery): A symbol that conceals the absence of reality.

4. Pure Simulacra (The Order of Simulation): A symbol that refers to no reality at all.

He illustrates this idea through a version of ‘Borges’ Fable’ [4, p. 1-2] in which a mad cartographer is obsessed with making a map that is a perfect representation of a kingdom. This pursuit evolves to a point in which the map, laid over the land, conceals and eventually replaces the actual kingdom. A regular map is an example of the first stage of simulation. It is a copy of an original which is obviously a symbol and makes no attempt to hide this fact. The next stage comes when the cartographer builds a map that is so detailed it mimics the land almost exactly. Now, any accidental or purposeful differences may be taken as truth, allowing the map to begin to distort reality. The cartographer continues to build a map that is so ‘perfect’ it physically spans the entirety of the territory, point to point. The inhabitants now reside on top of the map as it is laid over the land and conceals the real world beneath it. They may begin to forget, or not realize, that the environment they interact with was once meant to be a copy of the real state. It now conceals the absence of the territory it was meant to symbolize. This is deception. Finally, we reach pure simulacra as the citizens, now living on and within the map, begin to create representations of the world they now inhabit. A map of this world is a symbol representing the cartographer’s creation, which itself was meant to be a copy of the real world that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists as it has been buried and forgotten beneath its own recreation.

IV. AI as the Epitome of the Hyperreal

The precession of simulation to pure simulacra is compellingly analogous to the rise of generative AI models we see today. Simple AI programs can simulate ‘intelligence’ in useful ways without pretending to actually be intelligent. This is in stark contrast to how software like ChatGPT is designed to make you feel as though you are communicating with an intelligent partner. Within this enormous range of capabilities, we are able to distinctly pick out the characteristics of the four stages of simulation.

1. Copy

The term artificial intelligence is often conflated with machine learning when, in fact, artificial intelligence refers to the “use of technologies to build machines and computers that have the ability to mimic cognitive functions associated with human intelligence.”5 The key word here being ‘mimic’. Artificially intelligent systems complete tasks not necessarily by copying the mechanisms of natural intelligence, but by producing similar outcomes within a set of constraints. In this sense, simple AI algorithms are symbolic of human intelligence but by no means hide the fact that they are not truly intelligent. One example is the A* (pronounced A-star) search algorithm which is used to find the shortest path to a target. It is a relatively simple set of rules and heuristics that simulates an intelligent task (finding an optimal path) by following a straightforward set of instructions. It symbolizes an intelligent creature finding its way through a maze, but it would be difficult to mistake this for anything but a simulation.

2. Distortion

Machine learning refers to a subset of artificial intelligence which is “focused on algorithms that can ‘learn’ the patterns of training data” in order to “make decisions or predictions without [explicit instructions].”6 With machine learning algorithms, one can begin to see the distortion of what they are meant to represent. One of the simplest examples is the linear regression model. What this model does, in simple terms, is try to fit a trend line to a set of data points. It can then use this trend line to make predictions on new input it has not seen before. Even these simplest models distort reality in two ways. First, by their very name, they are described as learning. This allows us to anthropomorphize what is in reality a statistical model. It presents a level of familiarity that obscures the actual mechanism of the simulation. Second, they can never make perfect predictions, yet their results are taken and acted upon in many ways. Linear regression and other similar models are used in fields like business forecasting and insurance portfolios. Though they are very useful, these models create a slightly distorted image of the world and their predictions are then taken as representative of and used to influence that same world. In this sense, these simulations become real, and foreshadow the hyperreality of AI.

3. Deception

Modern AI algorithms are amazingly deceptive. The release of ChatGPT signified a dramatic shift in the power of AI to conceal the absence of reality. This is in part due to both technical advancements and the form factor in which it was released. The chat window that users most commonly interact with Large Language Models (LLMs) is specifically designed to mimic the experience of messaging another person. In other words, it is designed to conceal the fact that you are not. The conversational flow and complex responses create a powerful sense of an intelligent partner which masks the reality that there is not one. Non-text-based generative models are also becoming increasingly deceptive. This is evidenced by online communities like the ‘isThisAI’ subreddit, which is a forum dedicated to discussing “whether or not a picture, video or anything is AI-generated.”7 Apart from the ability to actually trick the viewer about its origin, AI-generated art and media are inherently deceptive. The inception of generative AI marks the first time in history that media does not, by default, imply an intentional creator. For the first time ever, the question “was this art created by someone?” is a relevant one. To whatever degree, it does have the capacity to conceal the lack of a real author. It can simulate the art and eliminate the artist; it can simulate the result and eliminate the origin; it can simulate the real and eliminate the real.

4. Pure Simulacra

The ultimate stage is reached when the replica refers to no reality at all. We currently find ourselves on the precipice of this era with generative AI. Despite how one might feel about it, AI permeates all corners of society and especially the internet. The “dead internet“ theory has gained more credence than ever, as the web becomes dominated by content that has lost its human referent.8 A major concern for the continued advancement of AI is data contamination or model collapse.9 Almost all of the accessible, original, human-created data has already been collected and used to train the current most powerful models. Therefore, future datasets used to train subsequent models will increasingly contain data that was generated by those models in the first place. This circular, self-referential training loop means that AI is no longer learning from human reality, but from a growing corpus of its own output. Even if the content is created by a human, it will become increasingly unlikely that that person has not been influenced by other AI sources (through AI-powered marketing, recommendation algorithms, or consuming AI-generated content). Therefore, even if we could filter out all of the data directly generated by AI, the next age of AI models will be trained on a body of data which represents a world already dominated by the influence of its predecessors. It will be, and has already become, a simulation feeding a simulation.

As AI continues to advance both technologically and in its influence, we will become just like the citizens living on the mad cartographer’s map. What was once supposed to simulate reality will become so fundamental that it will replace reality itself. In this stage, the resulting image, text, or piece of media is a symbol of nothing but the patterns within the data pool. It entirely lacks the original human referent, the artist’s inspiration, the genuine event, the maker’s conscious choice. Despite this, these algorithms continue to drive so many of the digital processes which pervade our lives. As we become more and more reliant on, and influenced by these simulations, they risk becoming reality itself. AI is transforming our environment into hyperreality. At this stage, AI is the culmination of Baudrillard’s ideas, transforming the original symbols of human expression (like art and text) into nothing more than symbols of a simulation of those things. This is pure simulacra: a copy that no longer references an original truth but rather the copy that preceded itself.

V. The Wider World of Simulacra

AI makes the judgment of non-reality easy because it is so obviously a simulation. We understand that, by its very nature, when we interact with AI we are interacting with something artificial. As we have seen, this elicits a loss, a movement away from what is typically desirable. However, we live in a world filled with simulation. Especially in the digital age, almost everything we see, interact with, learn from, and respond to can be seen as representative of something more ‘real’. The ways we communicate with each other, learn about the world, and navigate our consumerist society are all simulated experiences, yet they are so fundamental in our lives that it is often easy to forget this fact.

Take any text-based communication like email, instant messaging, and texting for example. Much, if not most, of our modern communication happens through these media. These forms of communication are ubiquitous in our daily lives, yet they are simulations of ‘real’ conversation. As with all simulations, aspects of the real experience are lost. You cannot read facial expressions or hear tone through text, and you miss numerous other subtle cues present in a face-to-face interaction. Yet, this form of communication is so omnipresent that we hardly ever consider this difference. The personal interactions which would have been necessary for typically daily tasks, like conducting business or catching up with loved ones, are simulated through the rapid transfer of text. On the surface, this is excellent, allowing for more efficient business and frequent connection with friends and family. However, in practice, we see that the convenience of this simulation allows it to replace its real counterpart. Business has less of a need for in-person meetings, and we may feel less of a desire to meet up with a friend if we have been texting them all week long. While this shift is not necessarily negative, it is a considerable change to our society that is driven by a simulation. It is, therefore, worth considering.

Other parts of our daily life are similarly mediated. Consider the frictionless entertainment ecosystem created by recommendation algorithms, or the pervasive nature of targeted marketing and advertising, where we, as individuals and as part of broader consumer trends, are simulated and then shown a reflection of that simulation. Media companies, whether news outlets or social platforms, profit by maximizing engagement rather than accuracy or depth. As the saying goes, in many of these environments we are not the customer but the product, offered as bits of attention to advertisers. In this attention economy, the primary goal is not to inform or enrich us but to hold our gaze for as long as possible. Companies build detailed models of our behavior, what we click on, pause over, or share, and then feed that simulated version of “us” back as an endless stream of tailored content. What may feel like frictionless convenience is really the removal of choice and surprise. Instead of searching, browsing, or risking boredom, we are continuously presented with whatever is most likely to keep us engaged. Over time, this has a profound effect on both ourselves and our culture. Initially, these systems approximate what we already like, but eventually the recommendations narrow and stabilize around whatever proves most effective at capturing our attention. What we consume because it is pushed to us gradually becomes what we experience as our genuine interests. In Baudrillard’s terms, the algorithmic profile of our desire and attention begins to precede the real, defining what we encounter and, in turn, who we become. The simulation of our attention does not merely reflect our wants; it trains them, until the hyperreal feed stands in for an open-ended, self-directed engagement with the world.

This phenomenon is not contained to the 20th century. One of Baudrillard’s famous articles, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,10 illustrates that hyperreality can stem from much simpler forms of media. While he does not deny that this conflict occurred, he asks whether the events of what has been called The Gulf War unfolded exactly as they were presented. For the typical western audience, this conflict did not take place before their eyes. They did not witness the undoubted violence and tragedies, nor did they listen in on the countless meetings between leaders. They did not hear the bombs, smell the burning oil, or feel the fear. Rather, they read about these things in the newspaper, listened to the stories on the radio, and watched reporters explain what was going on. These representations of the conflict may or may not have been created with the intent of accuracy and information but are still just that: representations, symbols of the actual events translated into various forms of media. This is what Baudrillard means when he said this war did not happen. What we understand to be the Gulf War is what we learn and interpret from these representations of the events. Our experience is that which is created in our mind while reading words on a page or listening to someone else’s abridged explanation. These experiences shape our understanding of the world, and in this way, these simulations become our reality.

The point Baudrillard emphasizes is that we interact with simulacra every day, all of the time. He thought this in 1981, and since then, the progression of technology, the internet, and now AI seems to almost caricature his ideas. As a society, we increasingly interact with our fundamental world through simulations of what one might consider real. We work remotely through computers and interact with our coworkers and bosses through text for money that will most likely never have a physical form, all to buy things which make us feel like the idealized and curated images of people we see on social media. These layers of representation have become so ubiquitous that we do not even realize they are there. Through slow integration, they have become our reality.

VI. Return to the Real: Making a Choice

We currently stand at a unique crossroads of technological advancement, marked by the rapid rise of generative AI, and find ourselves confronted with profound questions about reality and its simulation. AI is more than a mere productivity tool, it is a showcase of our deep, collective unease about the loss of authenticity in an increasingly mediated world. The layers of simulation that we interact with whether through the lens of AI, social media, or even our everyday consumer choices, are not new. Humans have been creating representations to symbolize their world for all of recorded history. However, the stakes are higher now, as the simulations of today are more complex, pervasive, and influential than ever before.

In this moment of rapid change, we are faced with a fundamental question, what is lost when we substitute the real for the simulated? The appeal of generative AI lies in its ability to replicate human productivity and creativity, but in doing so, it strips away a vital essence of the final result. This loss is not unique to AI, but rather makes visible a broader condition of the world we are creating, one in which symbols increasingly replace the very substance they were meant to represent. In this sense, Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality is no longer an abstract philosophical idea, it has become our everyday reality. What were once tools for representation have increasingly become the dominant framework through which we understand and interact with the world.

The discomfort we feel toward AI, then, is not solely a reaction to the technology itself, but an expression of a deeper anxiety about what is being lost through this shift. As Baudrillard warns, when simulations replace reality, we risk losing touch with the fundamental human truths that ground us: authentic connections, genuine creativity, the richness of lived experience, and even truth itself. For this reason, the same skepticism that we reserve for AI should be applied to the countless other forms of simulation that permeate our lives. Whether it’s through the curated images on social media, the algorithms shaping our wants and desires, or even the way we communicate through text rather than speaking to one another, we are continuously navigating a world that blurs the line between the real and the artificial.

In this age of hyperreality, the challenge is not to reject the digital world or the conveniences it offers but to cultivate a deeper awareness of what is being lost as we immerse ourselves in these simulations. Just as we scrutinize AI for its lack of authenticity, we must also question the other layers of representation that dominate our lives. The conversation about AI is not just about technology, it is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality itself. It allows us to consider what it means to be human, what makes art genuine, and what is lost through simulation. This technology has not only delivered the efficiencies advertised on the surface, but has also handed us a powerful lens for noticing which aspects of life we would rather keep real. It opens a window onto the other simulations that shape our world, from mediated relationships to algorithmically curated desires. Are we, like the inhabitants of the cartographer’s map, losing sight of the real world beneath the simulacra, or can we find a way to preserve the essence of reality while embracing the benefits of a digitally augmented existence? If we can cultivate this awareness and practice making these distinctions, we can gain the freedom to decide what we allow to fade into simulation and what must remain grounded in reality, rather than sitting back and quietly letting those decisions be made for us.

Mikail Krochta holds a degree in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and minored in Mathematics. He is passionate about life long learning, philosophy, social responsibility, and a commitment to life beyond a 9 to 5. You can often find him playing board games, exploring used book stores, and arguing about philosophy with his fiance.

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Love in Light of the Universe’s Heat Death

I lost my faith seven years ago in a silver Elantra parked in an overgrown gravel driveway. Truthfully, the process took a few years to complete, but that day stands out to me especially. I’d been secretly reading and listening to forbidden thinkers (Hitchens, obviously), and finally, I’d gotten to the point where I wasn’t sure if I could force myself to believe the tenets of my faith anymore. I’d lost the ability to believe. What ensued was a cascade of realization. That each fundamental action I would take from that point on would be terrifyingly, horrifyingly, devoid of true meaning. I was inconsolable. Surely, I’d lose hope in life and cease to find motivation to live, right?

Seven years later, an actively deconverting Mormon friend asked me a question on the back patio of a rent-stabilized apartment. We’d been talking about rebuilding after blowing up what you had assumed to be the fundamental principles of how you lived.

“I don’t know if this is too personal a question, but what did you do? If there is no God, nothing matters. If it’s all matter, just things in the brain firing, why does it matter?”

I looked at my BYU grad friend and saw myself. I sympathized in a way that I think only someone who’s felt the pain of destroying the neural pathways they spent a childhood building can fully understand. It is genuinely painful and like turning a part of your mind into a ghost that you can visit but never be again. I also smiled. I would never claim to have the answers to life, but I was happy to provide him my personal framework for meaning. After an hour of talking, I saw a glimmer of a smile appear for him, too.

From Matter to Matter(ers)

What snappy one-liner did I tell him to assuage his fears that everything wasn’t meaningless, the universe wasn’t coldly indifferent, and that he did, in fact, have a divinely appointed cosmic purpose to motivate him when life seems hopeless? What did I say when he asked if there was meaning in the universe after a loss of faith? I told him what I’ve been telling myself for years now. There probably isn’t.

There probably isn’t. An objective meaning to the universe, that is. At least as far as I can tell. Seven years ago in my Elantra, this was the pill that I had to swallow, and from what I gather, a rather sticky pill. It isn’t satisfying, it doesn’t go down easy, and it doesn’t land anything actionable in your lap. So how do you build a scaffolding of belief in what seems like an abyss of nothingness? You ask the second part of the question. Nothing matters to the cold, dark objective universe, but does anything matter to you?

Now that I mention it, there are some things that matter to me. My wife. Vanilla ice cream. The memory of my childhood dog. But do these things matter? I force the question again. To whom? To the universe? Almost certainly not. To me? As a matter of fact, they mean everything. Objectively, even. The key to the puzzle of purpose isn’t finally finding the picture on the box. It’s the realization that there is no puzzle, just a paintbrush, and it’s been squarely placed in your hand.

Three months later, I found myself once again speaking to a different set of acquaintances on the topic of meaning and purpose. This group was religious, however. Conversation started after someone sent a viral YouTube debate between three prominent voices in the online philosophy space. An atheist, a spiritualist, and a Christian. After three hours of arguing, quotes, memes, and rhetorical slam dunks, I finally got it out of me:

“For anything to matter, there needs to be a matterer!”

Ahh, yes, I’d done it. I’d simplified my ideas into a witty one-liner. Even more, I felt it was pretty novel. I started to imagine how I could package my little idea and deliver it to the masses. I’d stumbled into something that everyone who dabbles in philosophy dreams of—saying something new.

You Matter

Today, I woke up to a message. A screenshot from my friends. It was an article from the Oxford Academic, titled “Nothing “Really” Matters, but That’s Not What Matters” by Sharon Street, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at New York University. I’d been beaten to the punch.

My pride at saying something new, anything new, hissed out of me like a popped balloon. Begrudgingly, I read further. To my dismay, she was brilliant and said things better than I ever could.

“Does anything really matter? The answer depends on what one means by “really.” If the question is whether anything really matters in Derek Parfit’s robustly attitude-independent sense, then I believe the answer is no, nothing really matters in that sense. Nothing matters, ultimately, independently of the attitudes of beings who take things to matter. To matter is to matter from the point of view of someone.” —Sharon Street, Oxford Academic

Her position seems to be similar to mine. While I was initially excited to think I was saying something novel, I found myself glad to at least be in good company with what I was saying. Does anything really matter? I’m not sure. What I can tell you is that things really matter to me. And my guess is that some things really matter to you.

Here’s a helpful distinction I’ve found when someone tries to force their lowly view of atoms on you: Do you really like ice cream or is it just a frozen dairy treat? It feels silly when you put it that way, comparing the material state of something with the reality of its purpose in your life. I find that stating the material reality of something doesn’t seem to take away from a good matterer.

How about another one with bigger stakes: Do you really love her, or is it just a chemical reaction in your brain? I accept both. In the face of meaninglessness, I take back some silly sense of objectivity, a term oft levied by the theists and deists among us, and use it as my own. I can’t make the universe value you. But I can say that purpose can be objectively real if I’ve decided that something gives me purpose. The answer to meaning and purpose is as real as the answer to the question of if I love my wife. Yes, I really do.

Some Caveats

As I’ve stated, my framework is not free from critique. One of the most valid, I think, is that your sense of meaning is predicated on your mental state. This is addressed in Street’s paper.

“The causal threat of ceasing to think things matter never goes away, and there’s a kind of vertigo involved in recognizing that value is there only as long as you think it is and that you could slip into a state in which you stop thinking there is.” —Sharon Street, Oxford Academic

My prescription here is the same as Street’s. I can provide mechanism for avoiding these states of mind. Namely, getting sleep, maintaining close relationships, and cultivating varied interests and pursuits.

Alternatively, aside from fixing one’s “mental state,” I believe there is a secondary point that is potentially more motivating: you matter to someone else. Unfortunately, I can’t ground the purpose for your existence in something divinely beyond us. But I can tell you that people matter to me, and you matter to some people. In true days of despair when our routines and mental tricks have failed us, we can take some comfort in the fact that someone, somewhere, probably loves us. And to them, in their world, you objectively matter a great deal.

Finding Meaning and Why It Matters

My goal here isn’t to challenge anyone’s existing frameworks for meaning. It’s to provide a framework that helped me scaffold my beliefs during a time that I found personally challenging in the hopes that someone else in the rare position of leaving a religion would have it.

During that period of my life, my beliefs and my relationships were coming apart at the seams. The bedrock for objective existence in any capacity was taken from me. I needed a genuine framework for consistent belief, if only to justify my own actions to myself. For many of us who enjoy philosophy as a hobby, we roll ideas between the fingers of our mind like a piece of pocket sand soon flicked away. I contend we must be willing to take seriously a mandate to help people and view these questions as essential for fulfilling life, not purely stimulating discussion.

In the face of a crisis of meaning, I don’t have the answer, but I have an answer. Nothing matters except from the point of view of someone. When confronted by the question “Does any of this really matter?” I take some comfort in the fact that I can respond with “To who? To me? Of course it really matters.” and then live a life that provides me the richest, fullest answer possible.

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Bibliography

Street, S. (2017). Nothing “really” matters, but that’s not what matters. Does Anything Really Matter?, 121–148. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.003.0006

I. Introduction: Τaraché as Modal Misrecognition

Human suffering admits of many kinds. Some suffering tracks reality accurately: the pain of loss, grief following death, fear of genuine danger. Such suffering, while painful, serves a function—it orients us to the world as it is, motivating responses appropriate to genuine threats and genuine goods. But there exists another species of suffering, what the ancient philosophers called taraché (ταραχή), that differs fundamentally in origin. This essay argues that taraché arises not from fear, desire, or grief themselves, but from a specific cognitive error: misrecognizing the modal nature of their objects.

Taraché requires precise definition. It is not merely suffering, nor merely intense affect. It is self-generated disturbance arising from cognitive error about the nature of things—especially errors concerning necessity and contingency. More precisely: taraché is painful, function-inhibiting disturbance produced by misrecognition of reality, such that the suffering lacks a sound basis in the thing feared or desired. The disturbance is “baseless” in the strict sense that it corresponds to no real opportunity for action, does not track its object’s nature, and does not serve the function the underlying affect evolved to serve.

The two fundamental forms of this error are fearing what is necessary and desiring permanence from what is contingent.

Both represent reality as other than it is. Fear of the necessary is futile because necessity cannot be averted; demanding permanence from the contingent is futile because contingency cannot be converted into stability by wishing. In both cases, affect is directed at an object incapable of responding to that affect, producing disturbance without utility.

This commits us to a crucial distinction: not all suffering is pathological or to be eliminated. Pain can be informative, morally appropriate, motivational, and reality-tracking. Grief at loss, when proportionate, honors the good lost; fear of evitable danger motivates protective action. The target of this essay is not suffering as such, but suffering grounded in error—suffering that neither corresponds to reality nor serves any functional purpose. What makes ταραχή (taraché) distinctively problematic is not its intensity but its groundlessness.

II. Conceptual Framework: Necessity, Contingency, and Degree

The terms “necessity” and “contingency” admit of degrees and kinds. At one extreme lies absolute necessity—what cannot be otherwise under any circumstances. Death as such is absolutely necessary for composite beings; this follows from what it means to be constituted of parts that can come apart. At the other extreme lies radical contingency—events whose occurrence depends on factors so numerous and sensitive to initial conditions that no prediction or control is possible.

Between these extremes lies a continuum. Conditional necessity describes outcomes inevitable given certain conditions but avoidable if those conditions can be altered. Defeasible stability characterizes goods that, while impermanent, possess sufficient durability to reward cultivation and stewardship. The argument therefore rejects crude binaries. We claim not that everything is either absolutely necessary or radically contingent, but that fear and desire must be scaled to the degree and kind of responsiveness their objects actually possess.

This yields what we may call the Proportional Principle: to the extent something is necessary, it is not the proper object of fear; to the extent something is contingent and impermanent, it cannot be the proper object of a desire for permanence. The proportionality here is genuine. If a harm is ninety percent necessary given present conditions but ten percent avertable through effort, some fear may be appropriate—but far less than if the harm were largely contingent. Similarly, if a good possesses substantial stability over the relevant time horizon, attachment to that good is more warranted than attachment to something radically ephemeral.

Accurate modal cognition is therefore essential, not optional, for appropriate affective response. One must know—or make reasonable estimates about—the degree to which feared outcomes can be averted and desired goods secured or sustained. Errors in either direction produce dysfunction. Overestimating necessity produces fatalism and passivity where action could make a difference; underestimating necessity produces futile struggle against the inevitable. Overestimating permanence leads to devastating collapse when contingent goods are withdrawn; underestimating stability leads to failure to cultivate goods that could genuinely flourish.

III. Fear: Function, Proper Use, and Misapplication

Nature and Function

Fear is, in classical terminology, pain in the imagination of future evil. This definition captures something important: fear is anticipatory, oriented toward what has not yet occurred but might. This temporal structure gives fear its distinctive function. Unlike grief, which responds to accomplished loss, fear responds to potential loss—and can therefore motivate action to prevent that loss from occurring. Fear is evolutionarily adaptive precisely because it is instrumentally oriented toward avoidance. The creature that fears predators takes evasive action; the creature that does not becomes prey.

Fear is useful when and only when its object is evitable—when action responsive to the fear can avert or mitigate the feared outcome. This is fear’s proper domain: harms that are contingent upon conditions that can be altered. Fear of accidents motivates caution; fear of illness motivates hygiene and medical attention; fear of immediate danger motivates flight or defensive action. In each case, fear mobilizes attention, energy, and behavior toward outcomes that genuinely depend on that mobilization.

Misapplication

Fear becomes pathological when directed at what is necessary rather than contingent. Death as such is the paradigm case. Every composite being will cease to exist; this is not a contingent fact that might be otherwise but a necessary consequence of composite nature. To fear death as such—not this or that manner of dying, which may indeed be evitable, but the bare fact of mortality—is to direct fear at an object incapable of responding to that fear. The same analysis applies to loss as such and finitude as such. That we will lose what we love, that our capacities and opportunities are bounded—these are not contingent misfortunes but structural features of finite existence.

Why does fear of necessity produce taraché? The answer lies in the conjunction of four factors. First, fear of necessity is ineffectual: it cannot accomplish what fear exists to accomplish, namely the aversion of its object. Second, fear is intrinsically painful, a form of suffering. When fear serves its function, this pain is instrumental—a price paid for genuine protection. When fear cannot serve its function, the pain is pure cost with no compensating benefit. Third, sustained fear drains agency. The energy and attention devoted to fearing the inevitable are energy and attention unavailable for engaging with what can be changed. Fourth, fear of necessity involves cognitive error, a representation of reality as other than it is. The combination generates disturbance—pain without protection, expenditure without return, misrepresentation without correction.

Reframing

If fear of death is neither useful nor rationally grounded, what is its proper interpretation? Fear of death is best understood as love of life improperly expressed. The person who fears death intensely typically does so because life is precious to them, because they have goods they cherish and activities they find meaningful. This love of life is not the problem; it is the expression of that love as fear of the inevitable that produces disturbance.

The correction, therefore, is not the elimination of love but its redirection. Accept necessity—not as resignation but as accurate cognition of what is. Redirect the energy formerly devoted to fearing death toward living well within the time available. Retain fear only where it can function, where it can motivate action that genuinely protects the goods one loves. This reframing preserves what is valuable in the original fear—the attachment to life and its goods—while eliminating what is pathological: the futile resistance to what cannot be resisted.

IV. Desire and Love: Function, Proper Use, and Misapplication

Nature and Function

Desire and love bind us to goods. They motivate care, stewardship, and sustained engagement with what matters. Without desire, there would be no attachment; without attachment, no meaning. A life devoid of desire would not be a life of tranquility but a life of emptiness—if it could be called a life at all. The Stoic and Epicurean traditions have sometimes been interpreted as recommending the elimination of desire. This interpretation is mistaken, or at least incomplete. What the therapeutic traditions target is not desire as such but desire improperly calibrated to its object.

The proper domain of desire encompasses goods that can be secured, cultivated, or sustained—where “can be” is understood in proportion to the actual stability of the good in question. Friendship, knowledge, craft, care of loved ones: these are goods of sufficient durability to reward investment, even though they are not permanent. One can deepen a friendship, extend one’s knowledge, refine a craft, provide genuine care. Desire for such goods motivates the effort that makes their cultivation possible.

Misapplication

Desire becomes pathological not when it attaches to contingent goods—for all worldly goods are contingent—but when it demands permanence from what is impermanent. The error is not loving what can be lost; everything can be lost. The error is making permanence a condition of love, such that the love cannot survive the loss of its object. This includes even the most cherished goods: beloved persons, meaningful projects, one’s own capacities. All of these are contingent. To demand that they be otherwise is to demand what reality cannot provide.

Why does the demand for permanence produce ταραχή (taraché)? Again, four factors converge. First, desire cannot secure permanence from contingent goods; the demand is structurally incapable of fulfillment. Second, loss is inevitable; therefore grief escalates beyond its natural bounds when the underlying assumption was that loss should not occur. Third, when identity becomes load-bearing—when one’s sense of self depends on the permanence of contingent goods—the loss of those goods produces not merely grief but collapse. Fourth, the contingent nature of goods is denied rather than acknowledged, producing cognitive error analogous to treating necessity as contingent in the case of fear. This is the desire-analogue of fear of death.

Corrective Reframing

To love rightly is to love fully while acknowledging contingency, without demanding permanence as a condition of love. This is not detachment in the sense of caring less; it is detachment only from the impossible demand that contingent goods be permanent. The love itself can be as deep, as devoted, as intense as before. What changes is the implicit metaphysical assumption. One no longer assumes that the beloved—whether person, project, or capacity—will endure forever, and one’s love is not conditioned on that assumption.

This reframing preserves love while avoiding collapse. When loss comes—as it inevitably will—the person who has loved without demanding permanence can grieve the loss without being destroyed by it. The grief is genuine, proportionate to the good that was lost. But it is not compounded by the sense that something has gone wrong, that the universe has violated an implicit contract. Nothing has gone wrong; contingent goods are contingent. This is not news, but a truth that can be acknowledged in advance and that, when truly acknowledged, transforms the experience of loss.

V. Structural Symmetry

The parallel between pathological fear and pathological desire is now explicit. Fear has evitable harms as its proper object; when misapplied to necessities, it produces taraché. Desire has securable goods as its proper object (where “securable” is understood proportionally); when it demands permanence from what is contingent, it produces taraché. The structure is identical: an affect directed at an object incapable of responding to that affect, yielding disturbance without function.

This yields a general rule: an affect misapplied to an object that cannot respond produces disturbance. The formulation is deliberately abstract because it captures a pattern that recurs across many specific cases. Fear, desire, anger, hope—any affect that is instrumentally oriented, that exists to motivate action toward or away from its object—becomes pathological when directed at objects beyond the reach of action. The specific content varies; the formal structure remains constant.

The recognition of this symmetry has both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, it reveals that what might appear to be distinct problems—fear of death, attachment to impermanent goods, anxiety about the uncontrollable—are manifestations of a single underlying error: the failure to calibrate affect to the modal status of its object. Practically, it suggests that the therapeutic strategies effective for one manifestation should be effective for others, mutatis mutandis. The person who has learned to accept necessity in the case of death has learned something applicable to other necessities; the person who has learned to love without demanding permanence has learned something applicable to all contingent goods.

VI. Aristotelian Synthesis: Measure and Modal Cognition

The framework developed thus far integrates with Aristotelian virtue ethics more deeply than mere analogy. For Aristotle, virtue in the sphere of affect consists in the mean between excess and deficiency. Fear admits of both: the excess is cowardice, the deficiency is recklessness. What determines the mean is appropriateness to the situation—fearing what ought to be feared, to the degree it ought to be feared, at the time it ought to be feared. Similarly for anger, for confidence, for the various forms of love and desire.

What determines “ought” in these contexts? The present analysis provides the answer: modal cognition. Aristotle’s “appropriateness to the situation” just is modal cognition, properly understood. To fear “the right things” requires distinguishing what can be faced from what cannot, what is evitable from what is inevitable. To fear “at the right time” requires recognizing when action remains possible and when it does not. The phronimos—the person of practical wisdom—calibrates fear to the structure of the situation, and that structure is fundamentally modal.

Excess fear thus arises from treating necessity as avoidable, or from overestimating the probability or severity of contingent harms. Deficient fear arises from underestimating genuine contingent dangers, from treating what is genuinely risky as though it were safe. Excess desire arises from demanding permanence from contingent goods, or from treating goods as more stable than they actually are. Modal misrecognition, not emotion itself, produces vice.

The virtuous agent, on this account, is one who fears where fear can help, loves where love can sustain, accepts what cannot be altered, and does not make contingent goods metaphysically load-bearing.

This is not a life devoid of strong emotion but a life in which strong emotion tracks reality. Such a person can love deeply because they do not make their love conditional on impossible guarantees. They can face danger with courage because they accurately assess what is at stake and what can be done. They can grieve loss without being destroyed by it because they knew in advance that loss was possible.

VII. Philosophy as Modal Training

If the analysis thus far is correct, a question arises: how does one develop the capacity for accurate modal cognition? The boundary between necessity and contingency is not always obvious. Reasonable people can disagree about whether a particular outcome is inevitable or avertable, whether a particular good is stable enough to warrant investment or too fragile to bear the weight of attachment. The spectrum is real, and reading it accurately requires a trained faculty of discrimination.

This is where philosophy enters—not as abstract speculation, not as word games, not as moralizing, but as the systematic training of our capacity to recognize necessity and contingency, especially with regard to human goods.

Philosophy, on this account, is modal training.

It develops a mental faculty: the power to subtly distinguish degrees of necessity and contingency in the situations we face, and to calibrate our affective responses accordingly. Without this training, even a person who intellectually assents to the framework developed here will remain vulnerable to ταραχή (taraché) through simple misclassification of reality.

Why is such training necessary? Because human beings are, by default, remarkably bad at modal estimation. We systematically overestimate the controllability of what cannot be controlled, and we systematically demand permanence from what is inherently transient. We fear inevitabilities as though vigilance could avert them. We treat fragile goods as though they were guaranteed. These are not occasional errors but pervasive tendencies, built into the structure of human cognition and reinforced by cultures that promise control and permanence they cannot deliver.

The ancient philosophical schools understood this. Epicurus, the Stoics, and later the cognitive-behavioral tradition all target false modal beliefs as the root of unnecessary suffering. What unites these otherwise diverse traditions is a shared diagnosis: we suffer because we misperceive the modal structure of our situation, and we can reduce suffering by correcting that misperception. Philosophy, on this view, is not primarily about constructing theories but about sharpening perception, correcting misclassification, and retraining expectation. This is why philosophy has always claimed to be therapeutic—not as a metaphor, but as a literal description of its function.

Modal cognition, however, is not merely propositional. It is not enough to assent to the proposition “death is necessary” or “relationships are contingent.” The cognition must become habitual, must sink below the level of explicit reasoning into the automatic responses that govern our moment-to-moment experience. This is why philosophy, properly understood, has always included practices and not merely doctrines: exercises, meditations, reminders, dialogues. These are not supplements to philosophical understanding but its necessary vehicles. The Stoic who meditates each morning on what might be lost, the Epicurean who memorizes the tetrapharmakos, the Buddhist who contemplates impermanence—all are engaged in the same project: training perception until accurate modal cognition becomes second nature.

The upshot is that philosophy is indispensable for securing ataraxia because it refines the very faculty on which freedom from disturbance depends. While the boundary between necessity and contingency may initially appear blurred, philosophical inquiry—conducted not as idle speculation but as disciplined practice—allows the agent to distinguish structural constraints from alterable conditions with increasing precision. Without this ongoing study, the agent remains vulnerable to taraché through the simple misclassification of reality. Philosophy is both the diagnostic that identifies modal error and the training that corrects it. Reason guides practice; practice trains perception.

VIII. Consolation, Community, and Equality

There is a further dimension to this analysis that deserves attention: its implications for human solidarity. Necessity and loss are shared. Every human being faces the same fundamental constraints: mortality, vulnerability, the contingency of goods, the impossibility of permanent security. This commonality, far from being merely a source of private consolation, grounds genuine solidarity. We are all in the same situation with respect to what is most fundamental.

The mechanism here is worth spelling out. When a person has not accepted their own mortality and vulnerability, they experience these facts as threats—and by extension, they experience others who remind them of these facts as threatening. The sick, the dying, the bereaved, the visibly aging: all serve as unwelcome reminders of what the person is trying not to acknowledge. The natural response is aversion, avoidance, even resentment. Why must they force me to confront what I wish to deny?

Acceptance of limitation dissolves this dynamic. The person who has genuinely acknowledged their own contingency no longer experiences reminders of contingency as threats. The sick person is not an accusation but a fellow traveler. The bereaved person is not an unwelcome prophet but someone whose suffering is intelligible from within one’s own acknowledged vulnerability. What was aversion can become compassion; what was alienation can become connection. Shared finitude, once accepted, becomes a bond rather than a barrier.

This transformation has ethical significance beyond its psychological benefits. The community of the finite is a genuine community, grounded in shared facts about what it is to be a bounded, mortal, composite being. Recognizing this community does not eliminate difference—we remain distinct individuals with distinct circumstances, capacities, and goods. But it establishes an underlying equality that cuts beneath social hierarchies and contingent distinctions of fortune. Before the fundamental necessities, we are equals. The emperor and the slave both die; the billionaire and the pauper both lose what they love. This equality is not a leveling but a grounding—a recognition of shared condition that makes genuine compassion possible.

IX. Therapeutic Implications

What practical consequences follow from this analysis? The therapeutic tradition that runs from Epicurus through the Stoics to contemporary cognitive therapy suggests a broad outline. The fundamental intervention is cognitive: identify modal errors, correct misclassification, and thereby reduce affective escalation. If taraché is produced by cognitive error, then correcting the error should dissolve the disturbance.

This does not mean that reasoning alone is sufficient. Cognitive insight must be integrated with practice, with habituation, with the gradual reshaping of automatic responses that have been conditioned over a lifetime. The traditions that have taken this project seriously—Stoicism, Buddhism, cognitive-behavioral therapy, various forms of contemplative practice—all recognize that intellectual understanding is necessary but not sufficient. One must not only understand that death is necessary; one must come to feel, in one’s bones, that this is so, such that the fear of death no longer possesses its former grip.

It is important to stipulate that “correcting the belief” is not always a matter of simple syllogism. The neural pathways of fear are ancient and stubborn. However, accurate modal cognition is what allows us to select the correct tool for the job. If we believe our despair is caused by the world being “wrong,” we will try to fix the world—an often impossible task that compounds frustration. If we recognize our despair is caused by a modal error in our own expectation, we turn our efforts inward, utilizing therapy, community, and meditative practice to slowly align our gut feelings with our rational understanding.

The argument of this essay is therefore primarily directive: it proves that fear of death—and by extension, all taraché—is irrational, thereby justifying the labor required to remove it by other means. While the argument functions as a form of cognitive therapy, which is efficacious in resolving distorted feelings around loss, it also serves to validate and coordinate more intensive practices. Meditation, exposure therapy, pharmacological intervention where appropriate—these are not alternatives to philosophical understanding but its proper complements. The philosophical argument transforms what might appear to be futile resistance into a reasoned deployment of therapeutic resources. Reasoning guides therapy; it does not replace it.

The person seeking freedom from ταραχή (taraché) must engage in practices that reinforce cognitive correction: meditation that cultivates equanimity, exposure that weakens conditioned fear, reflection that deepens understanding, community that supports the difficult work of transformation. The philosophical analysis provides the map; the journey must be walked.

There are two independent grounds for undertaking this work. The first is intellectual: taraché is based on false belief, on a misclassification of reality. The person who fears necessity believes, implicitly, that necessity is contingent; the person who demands permanence believes, implicitly, that contingency can be converted to stability. These beliefs are false. One ought not to believe what is false. The second ground is practical: taraché is painful, function-inhibiting, and counterproductive. It undermines love, courage, and stewardship rather than supporting them. One ought not to suffer needlessly, especially when the suffering actively impedes the goods one cares about. This dual grounding—truth and function—is important. It means that the rejection of taraché is not merely therapeutic but also rational.

X. Conclusion

The argument of this essay can be summarized in a final principle: fear and love belong to what can be shaped; peace belongs to what cannot. The domain of fear is genuine danger, harm that can be averted through vigilance and action. The domain of love is genuine good, goods that can be cultivated, deepened, and sustained within their natural limits. The domain of peace is necessity—what is, what must be, what cannot be otherwise regardless of our wishes or efforts.

Fear of necessaries and desire for permanence are, at bottom, the same error. Both deny reality. Both direct affect at objects incapable of responding. Both generate taraché—painful, function-inhibiting disturbance that lacks rational foundation. And both are correctable through clarity. The correction requires not the elimination of affect but its proper calibration, not detachment from goods but attachment without impossible demands, not resignation to fate but accurate cognition of what fate is.

Philosophy, on this account, is the discipline that develops the capacity to correctly perceive necessities and contingencies with regard to human goods, and to act accordingly. It is both the diagnostic that identifies where we have misread reality and the training regimen that corrects our perception over time. Without philosophy—understood not as academic exercise but as sustained practice of modal discrimination—we remain vulnerable to the errors that generate needless suffering.

To obey necessity and contingency is not to abandon life but to free love and action from futile resistance. The person who has made this adjustment loves no less; indeed, they may love more, having removed the distorting lens of impossible expectation. They act no less; indeed, they may act more effectively, having removed the paralysis of fear directed at the inevitable. What they have abandoned is taraché and in its place they have gained something that deserves a name.

That name is ἀταραξία—ataraxia, freedom from modal ignorance that causes unnecessary suffering.

The term is not accidental; it is the alpha-privative of taraché itself, and means literally “the state of non-taraché). If the analysis of this essay is correct, ataraxia is not mere absence of feeling, not numbness or indifference, but the positive condition of affective accuracy: feeling what reality warrants, no more and no less. It is a state we have robust reason to pursue—on intellectual grounds, because it accords with truth; on practical grounds, because it enables flourishing. This is the modal therapy: not extirpation of affect but its education, not denial of reality but its acceptance, not rejection of love but its liberation from unmeetable conditions.

Taraché (ταραχή) is self-inflicted, function-inhibiting suffering generated by a misunderstanding of the modal nature of things. It is therefore rejectable—both in reason, by correcting belief, and in practice, by the disciplined habituation that makes correction effective. The goal is not the absence of feeling but the presence of wisdom: to fear what can be averted, to love what can be cultivated, and to accept what cannot be changed—each in its proper measure, each in its proper domain.

Cole Whetstone did his undergraduate work in Classics at Harvard University and received an MSt in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He taught Ancient Greek at Oxford and co-founded Oxford Latinitas, a society of Oxford academics dedicated to reviving Latin and Greek in scholarly use. He now lives in New York City, where he is a co-organizer for the New York Philosophy Club.

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In this Journal’s pilot issue from last March, we mentioned that contemporary culture is facing huge transitions globally. And the practice of philosophy is facing a transition as well. Until sometime in the 20^th century, one thing was pretty clear to its students: understanding the natural world and the nature of “man” was the enterprise of Philosophy, even though philosophers might not agree on which theory would be best. Even when the authority of Plato and Aristotle weakened as the modern era approached (just after the late medieval period), these students could at least be assured as to what the philosophical problems were. By the late 17^th century, “natural philosophy” was seeking to allocate the natural science of the day towards answering these so-called (and still called) “Big Questions” of philosophy.

But these “Big Questions” are modern questions for modern ears, and today many would insist that the era we are now in is no longer modern. Our present era is supposedly “postmodern” – though there is no exact consensus as to what that means. (And as a sign of the confusing times we’re in, there are even those today who want to restore natural philosophy to its venerable former status, and claim that science is doing exactly that – as if the postmodern moment were over before we even began to understand what it was!)

This journal issue follows up on two aspects of this transition.

(1) The first is the revisionary trend we see happening among today’s philosophers, as old views once generally discarded have been brought to new life in the present moment. As an illustration, we provide here three essays which, in rather different ways, assess the philosophical prospects for that most ancient of “sciences” – astrology.

Kilaya Ciriello is a practicing astrologer and staunch advocate of Platonism. In his article he presents us with a distinction within astrology that may help explain its modern disrepute. Most of us probably think of astrology as the entertaining pastime (or trusty consultant?) supplied in one’s daily horoscope – conveniently assisted by a teeming industry of (paid) consultants to help us “find happiness with astrology!” Kilaya begins to lay out for our consideration how a rather different astrological approach might prove much more promising.

D.Seiple, on the other hand, begins from his own skeptical attitude towards astrology, but suspends these suspicions with the intention of better understanding and assessing astrology’s prospects for regaining philosophical respectability. This turns out to be a more complicated project than its dismissive critics may have imagined, and raises other matters related to the philosophy of science. (On this, look forward to future issues of this journal.)

Cole Whetstone is a convinced proponent of astrology, but in a unique and surprising way. Cole’s intention is to revive the practice of divination. (Yes, you read that right.) Not however as one might naturally guess: through supernatural or occult means -- but rather by analogy with recent advances in computational efficiency. A.I. programs have recently shown spectacular progress based on large language models (LLMs) that are trained on vast sets of data, and when applied to natural language are able to predict and generate texts better (some say) than humans themselves. Cole applies this to what he takes to be the semiotic relation between celestial configurations and the well-being of humans. He has also outlined an ambitious empirical test to assess his theory.

(2) The second aspect we have chosen to pursue in this issue is the changing self-portrait we see emerging within philosophy itself. This is not by any means new to the postmodern era: since ancient times schools of philosophy have been defined by the subject matters and procedures that these traditions have expounded. But these days there is a deep disquiet within some precincts of the discipline itself, as some of its practitioners have exerted considerable philosophical skill towards questioning the very usefulness of philosophy. (You might notice a remarkable irony in this…)

Logan Zelk has channeled both the aphoristic style of Nietzsche and the substance of Martin Heidegger’s later work, to present a challenge not only to philosophy but to the equanimity of those who seek to practice it. Beginning from Socratic assumptions, his discussion proceeds somewhat in the skeptical spirit of Plato’s eventual successors, though with Heidegger’s emphasis on the primal origins of language and with Logan’s own vivid sense of philosophical tragedy.

Grayson McDowell offers us a very different picture of philosophy, which serves to remind us that not everyone has jumped aboard the deconstructionist bandwagon. Grayson retains the traditional faith in philosophy as a progressive discipline – that is, as one in which progress can be made and charted. In such world, it would be a matter of both rationality and commonsense to build upon the achievements of previous experts rather than always reinventing the philosophical wheel.

D. Seiple offers a brief reading of the Socratic project, especially as this might relate to the activities of our Philosophy Club, and invites readers to reflect on their own interest in having the conversations that our weekly sessions make possible. He sees the promise of philosophy not as endless questioning, but as a cleansing exercise in the service of one’s own wellbeing, and not just through our weekly meetings but through the pages of this journal as well.

(3) And finally, in this issue we have continued our tradition of welcoming literary submissions. Weiyang Gao has given us a fictionalized biography (but “based on a true story,” and perhaps we can guess whose it might be). It portrays the early years of Gantin, a Chinese student whose only solace in life has been his love of truth and his work as a visual artist. His encounter with philosophical texts promises a respite from the indignities of adolescent suffering, as he eventually embarks on his new life in America. We can look forward to following his continuing story in subsequent issues.

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Artwork: Jacques Villon, The Philosopher (1930)

D. Seiple is the Chief Editor of the NY Journal of Philosophy. He especially enjoys symphony concerts and pre-postmodern art museums. He has a master’s degree in theology (Drew) and a doctorate in philosophy (Columbia), and his publications can be found on PhilPapers.

Know Thyself is a central teaching within Plato’s dialogues. Socrates consistently recommended introspection in order to determine the best way of making decisions. Unless one knows oneself, he argued, one cannot possibly know what is best for oneself.

Plato’s dialogues contain not just this simple exhortation, however. They also contain suggestions for how to pursue it. Overall within Plato’s writings, all suggestions for knowledge of any sort converge on virtue. Virtue is considered to be one’s greatest wealth because its practice increases the clarity and strength of the mind. With a strong mind we could come to know ourselves and through that knowledge, come to know what is good for us. More specifically however, in the Republic and Laws Plato outlined a progression of subjects that must be studied and mastered in order to obtain the ultimate perfect knowledge of the Good, in itself. “Knowing the Good in itself” is short-hand for the knowledge of what is best for oneself in every situation. In Plato, this training, starts with mathematics, progresses to geometry, then to solid geometry and finally, to astrology.

“And isn’t he also a master of astronomy [astrology] and arithmetic and music—of all that an educated man should know?” (Theaetetus, 145a, cf. Republic 528d-e).

And it is in the description of astrology that we see the circle closed; that is, astrology is the science that brings the scientist to study him or herself most directly. The prior disciplines give the philosopher the tools which he or she then brings to astrology in order to see oneself most clearly.

The Greek word used within the dialogues is not a specific word for astrology but rather the Greek word we tend to translate as astronomy. This causes confusion in many readers when they are unable to understand how astronomy could be used as a device for self-inquiry. But the description given for what is called “astronomy” is not astronomy as we know it today but is rather actually astrology as it has developed in the West. Astronomy, as it is known and practiced today, was closer to what is called the natural philosophy of pre-Socratic Greece. In the following quote we can understand the reference to Hesiod as a reference to natural philosophy; that is, philosophy concerned with physical objects.

“Its name is astronomy, an answer no one would ever expect through unfamiliarity with the subject. People do not know that the true astronomer must be the wisest person. I do not mean anyone practicing astronomy the way Hesiod did and everyone else of that sort . . . but the one who has observed seven of the eight circuits, each of them completing its own orbit in a way no one can easily contemplate who is not endowed with an extraordinary nature” (Epinomis, 990a, emphasis mine).

This is not a description of astronomy. The field of astronomy discovers, names and describes the physical characteristics of the stars and planets while the field of astrology interprets these discoveries as metaphorically significant to our daily lives. In other words, astrology looks at the night sky as if there were a meaningful intelligence behind their placements, movements, appearance, etc. It is this meaningful design that differentiates astronomy from astrology, in the main. Astrology assumes that there is a meaningful correspondence between what we see in the sky above and in our very lives on earth. Astrology therefore looks at moving objects in nature and studies that movement in order to make better decisions in life in general.

A lot of confusion about this comes from the fact that astrology can be and has been used for different purposes; i.e., purposes that Plato did not endorse. Plato’s is not an astrology that predicts the future based on the movements of the planets and stars. The predictive way of using astrology is, to the best of our knowledge today, how astrology originally developed in Babylon and Sumeria. But Plato pointed to some other way of practicing astrology—to study oneself and the circumstances of one’s life through the orbits of the planets. This is the use of astrology that Plato recommended and may have even invented.

Regardless of who first developed this type of astrology, today called natal astrology, it has developed and grown in popularity from Plato’s time continually, up to and including today. Ptolemy summarized this Plato-inspired science of astrology in his Tetrabiblos (2nd century AD). Quite differently, astronomy, as a modern science, denies that there is any rational reason for looking at the planets in the way Plato suggested. Astronomy is only interested in studying observable characteristics—as if the planets and stars were only physical bodies, not designed and ruled by intelligence.

Socrates, however, rejected this type of materialistic science as the mere analysis of shadows. He taught that ontological reason and purpose must be the foundation behind any study of what moves and changes. Thus, astronomy serves utilitarian purposes of survival, security, comfort and pleasure while natal astrology serves self-inquiry. Although predictive astrology claims to serve the same utilitarian purposes that astronomy does (giving tools in order to win wars, for example), natal astrology is interested only in the movement of the soul from ignorance to wisdom, from imbalance to balance, from disharmony to harmony, from sickness to health.

“It signifies moving together (homou polēsis), whether the moving together of the heavens around what we call the poles (poloi), or the harmonious moving together in music which we call ‘being in concert’ (symphonia); for, as those who are clever in astronomy [astrology] and music say, all these things move together simultaneously by a kind of harmony. Apollo is the god who directs the harmony and makes all things move together (homopolõn), whether for gods or human beings” (Cratylus, 405c).

“It’s likely that, as the eyes fasten on astronomical motions, so the ears fasten on harmonic ones, and that the science of astronomy [astrology] and harmonics are closely akin” (Republic, 530d).

“The love felt by good people . . . must be encouraged and protected.. This is the honorable heavenly species of Love, produced by the melodies of Urania, the heavenly muse. The other . . .is common and vulgar. . . .when the sort of Love that is crude and impulsive controls the seasons, he brings death and destruction. He spreads the plague and many other diseases. . . All these are the effects of the immodest and disordered species of Love on the movements of the stars and the seasons of the year, that is, on the objects studied by the science called astronomy [astrology]” (Symposium, 187c-188b).

“A soul or souls—and perfectly virtuous souls at that—have been shown to be the cause of all these phenomena [of the stars and planets]” (Laws, 899a).

I am not claiming Plato’s words directly created the way in which astrology is practiced today. He only recommended a way of contemplating the planets and the stars in pursuit of self-knowledge. Western astrology developed out of this suggestion. Plato’s ultimate goal for astrology was to see the Good, in itself, as represented by the sun. His astrologer, after a long period of contemplation,

“Finally, I suppose, he’d be able to see the sun, not images of it in water or some alien place, but the Sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it. . . . And at this point he would infer and conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he used to see” (Republic, 516a-c).

This causation however is easily misunderstood.

When Socrates stated that the astrologer would eventually realize that the Sun is the cause of all changing phenomena he was describing the awakening of one who has left the cave (from the Republic’s famous Allegory of the Cave). This is the realization that intelligence precedes material forms: seeing the Sun as the cause of all phenomena then leads to seeing light as the cause of all phenomena and seeing light as the cause of all phenomena then leads to seeing our capacity to perceive as the cause of all phenomena. So when the astrologer recognizes that the Sun is the cause of all things, he or she is verifying the premise of astrology; i.e., that intelligence is behind our perception of all objects and their motions. This is also the perception of the possibility for permanent happiness through the recognition of an intimate connection between our internal and external worlds.

Socrates’ astrology also engages the virtue of piety (eusebeia) because on face value it is concerned with the gods. For Socrates, astrology begins when one (at least, hypothetically) accepts that the planets and stars are intelligent gods who are actually our controllers, managers, judges, directors, advisors and even owners/puppeteers. This piety is, of course, largely absent from modern astrology. But nevertheless it is quite stridently described in Plato’s dialogues:

“I declare that God is the cause and that it could never be otherwise. . . . Unless a soul is attached to each of them or even in each [of them], earth, heaven and all the stars and all the masses made of these things cannot move with such precision. . . . making all that takes place turn out good for us all” (Epinomis 983b-c, emphasis mine).

So Plato’s astrology automatically includes and supports piety while modern astrology doesn’t require this idea of divine agency within a divine plan in order for it to be practiced. For Plato, astrology is presented as a vehicle for piety in that it gives a tangible way to picture, envision and listen to the gods. This divine form of communication naturally requires an intense effort on our part to decipher. Our intelligence naturally expands in our efforts to decipher the movements of the planets and stars in order to understand what the gods are saying.

The astrological interpretations of the astronomical observations thus serve a spiritual purpose and not a material one. The message in the sky, Socrates reported in the Republic, has nothing to do with physics in the modern sense:

“We should consider the decorations in the sky to be the most beautiful and most exact of visible things. We should consider their motions to fall far short of the true ones. . . . [the astrologer] won’t try to grasp the truth about them [their motions, etc.] in any sort of way since they’re connected to body and visible [like the shadows of the cave]. . . . It is by means of problems then, as in the study of geometry [or measurement], that we will pursue astronomy and we will let be the things in the heavens if we are to have a part in the true science of astronomy and so, convert to right use from uselessness that natural indwelling intelligence of the soul. . . . [And so, we should prevent our students] from attempting to learn anything that does not conduce to the end we have in view . . . the [spiritual] goal of everything” (Republic, 529c-531a emphasis mine).

“Let be the things of the heavens” is the key phrase here indicating a rejection of the scientific study of objects for utilitarian purposes. “The [spiritual] goal of everything” refers to reason. We are told to Know Thyself in order to find the Good, in itself. How can we recognize what is good for us if we don’t know who we are? And the Good, in itself, is what we want for its capacity to make us permanently happy. We gain that knowledge through virtue, through the power of virtue to clear our minds of all lies. So astrology is a means of developing that difficult to develop virtue, piety—looking up at the planets and stars to see our place within the theater of the gods—for the help it gives us purifying our minds. Needing a clear mind to know ourselves and see the Good, astrology has the ultimate goal of everything, always in mind.

Interestingly, Socrates presented astrology, in this very specific way, as the highest of philosophical practices. It is through the contemplation of celestial appearances and motions that we learn the most important lesson the gods have to offer: math, measurement and proportion. Measurement is a skill, utilized and developed through contemplation of the heavens, giving structure to the dialogues as a whole. Measurement utilizes the discovery of the single defining principle of what is real and true and so begins the journey of building wisdom along an absolute path. Measurement is therefore a repudiation of relativism and so its development is crucial in any attempt to give philosophical support to morality and ethics in society. Thus, the beginning, practice and end of “star-gazing” is what allows for measurement to exist in the absolute sense—the realization that reason or intelligence has ordered and is controlling all things. And the sky, Socrates said, is the easiest place in which to verify that for ourselves:

“The only account that can do justice to the wonderful spectacle presented by the cosmic order of sun, moon and stars and the revolution of the whole heaven is that reason arranges it all” (Philebus, 28d).

“Such was the reason, then, such the god’s design for the coming to be of time, that he brought into being the Sun, the Moon and five other stars, for the begetting of time” (Timaeus, 38c).

The astral bodies, then, through a depiction of order, depict the intelligent stage upon which we have been placed and the intelligent script which we are then to read.

Astrology as loosely sketched within the dialogues is a practice that leads to a deeper spiritual understanding of ourselves and our lives. This is astrology in its purest form. Through it, we study the movement of the stars in order to determine how best we should move.

“Now there is but one way to care for anything, and that is to provide for it the nourishment and the motions that are proper to it. And the motions that have an affinity to the divine part within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These, surely, are the ones which each of us should follow. We should redirect the revolutions in our heads that were thrown off course at our birth, by coming to learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe [in the night sky], and so, bring into conformity with its objects our faculty of understanding, as it was in its original condition. And when this conformity is complete, we shall have achieved our goal: that most excellent life offered to humankind by the gods, both now and forevermore” (Timaeus, 90c-d, emphasis mine).

In other words, we study the night sky to study ourselves, our capacity for harmony and disharmony, in order to learn how to live the best of all possible lives. That this quote comes from Timaeus is significant, as this dialogue was the most influential of all of Plato’s dialogues until the Age of the Enlightenment (just after Marsilio Ficino and others reintroduced ancient Greek texts to Europe).

Astrology for Plato was also used to provide a proof for the existence of gods in the first place, all in support of developing virtue:

“...two arguments in particular which encourage belief in the gods. . . . One is . . .[that] the soul . . . is far older and far more divine than all . . . things . . . Another argument was based on the systematic motion of the heavenly bodies and the other objects under the control of reason, which is responsible for the order in the universe” (Laws, 966d-e, emphasis mine).

In other words, the heavenly bodies show a mathematical harmony that proves intelligent creation or the primacy of intelligence over matter. And so, astrology is used to refute “scientists [who] assert that these things are simply earth and stone, incapable of paying heed to human affairs” (Laws, 886e).

In proving for intelligent design, Socrates sought to prove the soul as both its object and its agent and as the faculty within us capable of following the instructions conveyed by it on how to do best in life and achieve the happiness that we want. This places astrology in a very highly esteemed position within Socrates’ instructions, since everything depends on our ability to successfully transfer our identity from the body to the soul — from something changing to something unchanging, from something fleeting to something durable. The soul, Plato taught, is the landing strip for the practice of Know Thyself. We need a knowledge of the soul in order to come on board with and acquire virtue and thereby make our communities better for it:

“What about the soul? Will it be a good one if it gets to be disorganized or if it gets to have a certain organization and order? The name for the states of organization of the body is ‘healthy,’ as a result of which health and the rest of bodily excellence comes into being in it. . . .And the name for the states of organization and order of the soul is ‘lawful’ and ‘law’ which lead people to become law-abiding and orderly and these are justice and self-control” (Gorgias, 504b-d).

This is the same way that Socrates connected virtue — as the health of the soul — with obeying the law in the Republic. And it is the soul that astrology studies and helps to prove — all in the service of virtue and making the best of all possible choices in life:

“Soul, by virtue of its own motions, stirs into movement everything in the heavens and on Earth and in the sea. The names of the motions of soul are: wish, reflection, diligence, council, opinion, true and false, joy and grief, cheerfulness and fear, love and hate. All those qualities which soul employs when in conjunction with reason it runs aright and always governs things rightly and happily. And when, in converse, with unreason, it produces results that are in all respects opposite” (Laws, 897 a-b emphasis mine).

And so, in Plato’s astrology there are eight gods that come to be revered when piety is developed: the Sun, the Moon, five planets and the sky itself. The “heavens,” the sky itself, or Uranus, is the place in which not only the stars and planets dwell but the earth as well. It also represents the practice of astrology as Plato described it. So, for Socrates the night sky referred to the known universe. And these heavens are considered, as a whole, the god Uranus. Socrates placed special importance on this god (as the patron of astrology itself) in the power that this god has within our lives and also the importance of the lessons he teaches. This is most likely why modern astrology considers the planet Uranus to be the god of astrology.

“How can we keep from believing that what causes all things that are good for us is also the cause of the good that is by far the greatest, namely, wisdom? So, Megillus and Clinias, what god am I speaking of with such solemnity? Uranus, the god whom above all others it is most just to pray to and to honor, as all the other divinities and gods do. We will unanimously agree that he has been the cause of all other good things for us. But we declare that he is really the one who gave us number too [i.e., measurement], and he will continue to give it, supposing that we are willing to follow him closely [to practice astrology — I suggest]. If we come to contemplate him in the right way — whether we prefer to call him Cosmos or Olympus or Heaven [Uranus] — let us call him as we like, but let us notice carefully how by decorating himself and making the stars revolve in himself through all their orbits, he brings about the seasons and provides nourishment for all. Together with the entirety of number, he also furnishes, we would insist, everything else that involves intelligence and everything that is good. But this is the greatest thing, for a person to receive from him the gift of numbers and go on to examine fully the entire revolution of the heavens” (Epinomis, 977a-b, emphasis mine).

This quote, in its entirety, is actually an instruction in astrology as an expression of piety. That “intelligence and everything that is good” is furnished by the god is not given as a statement to be considered for its factual basis. It is given instead to those who have already accepted Socrates’ suggestion that virtue must be developed. Accepting that, this speech recommends piety related to the sky as divine. It tells us how and why to be pious and how that must exclude any impulse to utilize empirical observations non-reverentially.

So, this quote instructs us that the god of the sky is the god of astrology who teaches the lesson of number by giving us a model of it to look at. So the lesson of number not only teaches the metaphysics of absolutism (how to judge things absolutely; i.e., measure them precisely for good and bad) but it also teaches us the cyclical or periodic nature of all motions in the world. The planets move forward and they also move backward with regularity. This and other types of celestial motions give us periodicity or time, itself. As Socrates proclaimed in the Republic,

“For everything that has come into being destruction is appointed. . . There is a cycle of bearing and barrenness for soul and body as often as the revolution of their orbs come full circle” (546a).

An understanding of cycles is thus a very practical aspect of wisdom as a whole. Therefore, astrology is the branch of wisdom that concerns not only measurement but also timing. Both are aspects of order and harmony. We observe the periodicity of the motions of the planets and introspect about the presence of similar cycles within. If both show an underlying intelligence then a bridge appears between our inner and outer worlds giving us hope for some type of lasting fulfillment.

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Artwork by Emily Kruse

Kilaya is an independent scholar & self-published author (SOCRATES GURU, the latest), Stanford alumni ('93 in Modern Thought & Literature, studied philosophy with Stuart Hampshire) and native New Yorker, who maintains TheFundamentalistPlato.substack.com .

In his article for the current issue of the NY Journal of Philosophy, Kilaya Ciriello offers us a perspective on astrology that may be new to many of us. However, his opening point is more familiar. The Socratic injunction “Know Thyself” is the well-known exhortation to virtue and the long-standing marker for the origin of Western philosophy. Soon after the death of Socrates, this term “virtue” came to cover the positive character traits encompassed by the Platonic notion of the Good. The everyday world, as we familiarly know it, is said to be less real than the unseen unity underlying it, and this somehow connects our character traits to a unifying Whole. This is a view that had actually been rather widely accepted until only the last few centuries. Kilaya still accepts this view, as his article makes clear.

This ancient, all-embracing concept of the Good continues to puzzle many modern minds, who instead regard the virtues as separate functions, nothing more than mundane dispositions explaining why we perform well whatever tasks we should. To fix your badly leaking sink you call in the kind of person who has been trained in the skills of plumbing. In quaint language, you could say that such a person possesses “the virtues of a plumber” – and that’s that. But if we believe in astrology, there’s much more to it.

Personally, I have long been among the most skeptical when it comes to astrology, which has always struck me as one of the least reputable of human endeavors, except perhaps as innocent entertainment for Halloween parlor games.

Other readers may disagree with me. So here may be our chance to think this through a little more. However, that means applying the Principle of Charity and starting with as sympathetic a view towards astrology as our imagination allows. Then we can proceed to testing it out in thought, and with evidence if we can muster it. There are other ways of doing philosophy, but this general strategy pretty much captures how professionalized philosophy has developed, and it bears the same general features of logic that the scientific method displays – what is called “testability.” And we can expand this to include testing out the conceptual as well as the empirical implications. Yet despite this, we also face some limitations when it comes to astrology, which my discussion here should make clear.

**

People tend to be opinionated towards astrology, including some in our philosophy club. I’d bet that at least a few of us think it’s pure nonsense. Kilaya’s article is particularly interesting because although Kilaya himself is a practicing astrologer, he acknowledges that the more pop versions of astrology simply cannot be rescued from the status of a pseudoscience. So we actually start from a shared point of view on this, even if we tend to be skeptical.

“Pseudoscience” is a term that gained currency among skeptics in the 19^th century. Today that same term is intended to distinguish theories and methods that claim to be as good as the recognized sciences but whose procedures are at variance with scientific method. Phrenology is a good example. It claimed to predict character traits of a person (including intelligence and moral virtue) by measuring bumps on the skull, which were supposed to reflect effective use of the brain’s “muscles.” The more mental competencies were “exercised,” the more space they would need in the expanding skull, just as the more push-ups a guy does, the more his expended masculinity should pop out through his expanding tank top.

Phrenology has been discredited,1 but it had remained vibrant in some quarters through the early twentieth century. Likewise, pseudoscientific applications of astrology flourish in some quarters even today, and your daily horoscope would be an example of this, insofar as it might aim to promote specific predictions and advice concerning upcoming events in your own life. This is commonly referred to as horary astrology, which is now generally rejected even among the “more cautious” defenders2 of what Kilaya calls natal astrology.

I have always assumed that something like horary astrology was just what astrology is all about. But I like to keep an open mind, and so when Kilaya announced that he was giving a workshop on natal astrology, I decided to give it a try. That required me to get my birth chart drawn up – easy to do online. Having done that, however, I was quite surprised when it gave me some definitive personal information that it should not have been able to produce just from the data I entered.

And this made me seriously wonder, at least for a moment, whether astrology shouldn’t be rescued from its banishment as a pseudoscience. So how might we decide this? Let’s see.

**

People who check their daily horoscope for guidance often reflect back on their immediate past and actually do find meaning in what they read. But is this because (this version of) astrology is a science?

Let’s take a related example. Some Saturday night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I might pause before a lovely Grecian urn, get enraptured by those ancient figures, and suddenly recall familiar words from my freshman English-lit class – “Thou still unravished bride of quietness!” Those words certainly do “make sense” of what I am observing, to me anyway. But in finding aesthetic meaning in a piece of pottery, have I just made a scientific discovery?

Of course not. But why not? We might say that for this, my mental image must meet the criteria of genuine science. What makes intuitive sense to me personally might not make scientific sense simply because it would not be testable by “objective” criteria. Simply being inspired by my love of John Keats’ poetry doesn’t cut it. Similarly, any conviction that I (as a Gemini3) might take away from horary astrology is nothing more than an index of my own particular sensibility (my own personal “lens”), which tough-minded empiricists could care less about. On the other hand, if those same astrological findings could be scientifically confirmed, then even the empiricists would have to care quite a bit more.

Testability is supposed to assure us that a successful prediction is not just a lucky guess, by allowing even skeptics to see if a horoscope’s readings can get scientifically confirmed. But believers in astrology should want to confirm such a prediction as well, by relying on more than the mere feeling they have about it, and more than a few coincidental predictions that happen to come true. Would anyone really want to say that a broken clock can tell time just because it happens to be right twice a day? Likewise for any retrospective confidence in felt “synchronicity” between the readings of my horoscope and the facts of my real life. Is there any reason to trust that the horoscope can “tell” my future in that way? Most thinking people these days would say no.

**

But that’s just for pop astrology. What about natal astrology? Can its findings be confirmed? Deciding this turns out to be more complicated than it might at first seem.

Nonetheless, many knowledgeable people think the issue is already decided. Just look at some of the expert internet resources. If you consult the Wikipedia entry for “Western Astrology,” for example, you’ll find a decent overview of the topic, but it begins with a definitive-sounding pronouncement: “Astrology is a pseudoscience and has consistently failed experimental and theoretical verification.“ (Notice that no distinction is made between horary and natal astrology.) One of the supporting citations is the article on science and pseudoscience in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is commonly taken to be the most comprehensive one-stop summary for a vast number of philosophical topics. Many young scholars in particular, having once landed there, feel no need to stop off anywhere else. And in this case they might not need to, if astrology is really no better than phrenology (or phlogiston, to take another example).

Kilaya’s project, on the other hand, wants to make us skeptical towards this common view. Natal astrology, as he describes it, seeks to tell us less about our future destiny and more about our underlying character. This is not to say it has no relation to the later events – its relation is roughly the same as the relation between “virtue” and the future. I may be a generous type of person (I might have the “virtue of generosity”), but that would not imply that I’m going to be offering $10 to absolutely every needy person I mean. Would it actually have any specific predictive implications at all? Astrologically derived “information” (if you can really call it that) is said to be more subtle than such predictions, which (again) are more like pop horoscope readings.

Actually though, what natal astrology conveys does seem to have something in common those poetic words about the Grecian urn at the Met. As we’ll see, natal astrology (like romantic poetry) is an invitation to draw upon our subjectivity rather than just the empirical evidence. But in contrast to that Keats moment in the museum, this also presents us with a decisive contrast with horary astrology.

This is very important to see. Natal astrological is an invitation to self-interpretation and not just sentimental revery, and this serves “a spiritual purpose and not a material one”4 -- less about the stars than about the self.

Natal astrology then offers itself as one path to self-knowledge, but we need to be careful when we say this. (1) First – as I understand it, natal astrology at its best does not hazard specific predictions, nor does it stop at rather vague formulations of a person’s character (“You are an extrovert!”). Any specification about details like this would not be a final result. It would be an opening for self-reflection, to see how (if at all) a particular reading actually applies – and it allows for other factors to override such an application. Missing this would be missing the whole point, by treating the outputs of the calculations as a substitute for the person herself. This would place someone in the same position as the sophomore who turns in a philosophy paper authored by ChatGPT – in Kilaya’s language, we could regard it as substituting a material purpose (getting the needed grade) for a spiritual one (self-growth in one’s intellectual virtues).

(2) Secondly, we need to be careful about how we understand “self-knowledge.” That’s a topic for another discussion entirely, but let’s see if an example can help here. If I learn somehow (maybe from the stars and planets?) that I have a tendency to be extroverted, then I might want to consider this when I am offered a job opportunity with no likely chance to interact with my co-workers. (And I might be surprised at what this consideration might open up.) I might feel seduced by its prestige and promised pay, but this would be a job that isolates me from human contact. So I need to decide if it’s a decent fit for me nonetheless (since I may have heavy debts to pay off, perhaps). On the other hand, a tough job might get even tougher if I fail to give enough weight to the sort of person I am.5 Here I would be facing a moral dilemma, and moral dilemmas are always invitations for self-assessment. Whenever we address moral dilemmas in real life, we are hazarding out into uncertain territory, with or without astrology to help.

Of course to a skeptic, the empirical leniency that natal astrology exhibits – leaving us with only interpretive suggestions rather than clear decision procedures -- might seem suspiciously convenient given the lack of more solid evidence for astrology’s efficacy. How is astrology’s vagueness anything more than an escape hatch (what philosophers of science call an “ad hoc hypothesis”), designed to save a bad theory from discredit? That (allegedly) would make astrology the pseudoscience its skeptics claim. That is what we’re trying to decide here. If we really need a definitive decision procedure for astrology to survive its discreditors, we’ve reached our conclusion. Astrology can’t provide this. So -- end of story?

But things may not be quite this simple. It is certainly true that an extrovert horoscopic reading, say, might not cough up rigorously testable predictions. But there turns out to be a plausible reason for this. An elaborate system of further stellar and planetary indicators, which are said to pick out additional factors (once again, other tendencies of character), might either support or mitigate any isolated character trait. At least that’s what any astrologist might tell me on the days I don’t “feel” like the extrovert the stars discern me to be.

Admittedly this entire story though feels like a black hole to skeptics. But here we may notice a surprising fact. This elaborate conceptual machinery produces calculations rather comparable to a meteorological model6 -- one that “predicts” but might not absolutely promise fair weather for this Saturday’s planned pool party. So I listen to the weather report and have to do a little soul-searching so see if I really am going to go. I can’t get a definitive prediction from the weatherman to help me! Instead, I need to consider the risks inherent in the uncertain situation. Once I know the risks, I then need to know myself well enough to make a wise decision. (What do I really want? How risk averse am I?)

So here is what we see at this point: astrology, with its vast conceptual network of categories and calculations, embodies a comprehensive systematic framework for producing probabilistic models (and A.I. works in the same general way.) And this provide us our first clue as to how astrology might be rescued from the pseudosciences. We have applied the Principle of Charity, to discover that natal astrology is very similar to normal science -- at least in its repertoire of rather exact calculations, and this makes it possible to apply the model to anyone with a complete birth chart. These conditions (the exact placement of the stars and planets relative to the earth) are not generally addressed in the same manner by normal science, but appear to be every bit as empirical as many of the conditions commonly recognized by social psychology (for example), and perhaps more empirically rigorous than psychoanalytic explanations.7

**

Even so, by itself this isn’t enough to effect a rescue from pseudoscientific exile. For one thing, it still may not be clear how astrology differs in this way from Ptolemaic astronomy, which offered its own structural machinery for a host of specific predictions.8 And secondly: just because a model may yield a consistent range of results (reliability), that does not mean that the results are true (valid) – as a number of our group members have pointed out in the banter after our Wednesday evening meetings. Even advocates of phrenology might appeal to a consistent set of scull configurations for their teenage subjects, without any eventual predictive success.

So again, how would we decide the status of astrology? The obvious proviso is the same we have been considering already – that it needs to make predictions that turn out empirically true, at least at a rate better than pure chance alone would suggest.

But this means we cannot consider traits of character in isolation. Let’s take another example: let’s say I “know” that I am an outgoing and gregarious person (a true extrovert), and I have also heard that my birth sign is Gemini. My friendly astrologer is not at all surprised at this since persons with a so-called “positive” sun sign (Gemini’s are included here) are correlated with extrovertism. He even announces some carefully designed empirical studies appearing to confirm this – not by showing how any one predictive trait turns out true, but how an entire range of such predictions show a statistical tendency to do so. And lo and behold, yes! My due diligence uncovers at least one such confirming study from highly reputable researchers.9 This is exactly the kind of empirical study the skeptics should be interested in, no? This would seem to indicate that astrology can do what it claims: even someone who did not already know their sign (which happened to be Gemini) and never thought about whether or not they were extroverted, might learn from their birth chart that they are “likely” to be so. There, a true prediction!

Alas. Problems remain for the astrologers even here. For one thing, these results appear to show a rather weak relationship. Even this begs for an explanation, though. Perhaps, as Kilaya suggests, there is after all a deeper metaphysical reason, having to do with the Platonic Good. That might be an explanation for the statistical significance of the findings on this. But there might be less ethereal reasons -- the study design might have been faulty, or the statistical calculations erroneous. This has been suggested even by some who report having confirmed those extroversion findings.10 The most convincing of these caveats might be the possibility that subjects in these studies already know their sun sign. Thus they succumb to confirmation bias, without recalling the many occasions in their lives when the behavioral opposite trait occurred instead.

Is it possible to determine this? Here is a question that only a statistician could love, so I won’t belabor it any further. (Here is the limitation I have already mentioned). But it’s worth noting that those who do believe in astrology are not worried about such questions. They typically come to their beliefs because they think astrology “works.” This is hard to refute (as we have seen), and this is not because the evidence is so overwhelming (as we have also seen). As one vocal critic has indicated, the appearance of efficacy for astrology does not depend upon the demonstrable truth of the theory, but only upon the subjective resonance someone feels for the news that astrology brings them. And that brings us back to where we started, in the Museum and in front of the Grecian urn. To say astrology “works” is something like saying that a placebo works – which it very often does, and perhaps even when a tested subject knows it’s only a placebo!11 “Astrology is thus made nonfalsifiable…”12

**

This mention of “falsifiability” is import here. Just as long as we accept the falsifiability as the foundation for scientific credibility, we seem unable to rescue astrology from disrepute. Falsifiability was the “demarcation criterion” for philosophers of science as recently as the late 1970s, and it still seems to be gospel throughout much of the skeptical literature.

Of course, most thinking astrologers do not accept this starting point,13 arguing instead that “no factor in a birth chart shall be judged in isolation.” Again, this would be the reason that even the most specific predictions of character end up only weakly reflected in the empirical studies: there are too many confounding factors, so that we should not take apparent refutations of a theory as the final word.

So then this might be where the discussion needs to go. Is the falsifiability criterion itself defensible?

But this will have to await another discussion.

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Artwork by Carin Yoo

D. Seiple is the Chief Editor of the NY Journal of Philosophy. He especially enjoys symphony concerts and pre-postmodern art museums. He has a master’s degree in theology (Drew) and a doctorate in philosophy (Columbia), and his publications can be found on PhilPapers.

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1. SIGNS AND PORTENTS:

Modern scientific thought often emphasizes a sharp distinction between correlation and causation. “Correlation,” it is claimed, “does not equal causation.” And humorous examples are often adduced to demonstrate the point.1 This (correct) doctrine has led, I will argue, to a widespread dismissal of certain correlative methods as useless superstition, even when they manifestly are not.

Exemplifying this view is the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who, in Leviathan, broadly rejects divinatory practices — astrology, augury (interpreting bird behavior), aruspicina (examining animal entrails), dream interpretation, and metoposcopy (facial or palm reading) — as irrational and deceptive. These methods, he argues, rely merely on conjectures drawn from past experiences and human fears rather than rigorous causal reasoning, and so amount to nothing more than “juggling and confederate knavery.”

Here I will take partial exception to this standard view of divination – though not as an uncritical vindication of astrology or divination as they are commonly practiced today. On the contrary, most modern iterations of these traditions lack the rigor and statistical coherence that would make them scientifically useful. But this does not invalidate the deeper insight that indirect signs — when properly aggregated and interpreted — can reveal truths otherwise inaccessible. Rather than abandoning these ancient arts to the dustbin of superstition, we propose a reformation: a new science of signs, grounded in statistical modeling, interdisciplinary insight, and epistemic humility.

It will be the task of this essay to make this clear and to suggest how some of these practices might be more rigorously modeled and empirically tested

2. SIGNS AND PORTENTS:

Hobbes’ view reflects an early modern scientific skepticism still prevalent today, which tends to dismiss the above-mentioned associative practices outright, as invalid for the purposes of scientific prediction. To their credit, it is hard to see how practices such as random verse-dipping or tarot cards — methods Hobbes refers to as “mere lottery”— could ever be predictive, as they appear to lack plausible mechanisms for it, and thus almost certainly fall into the category of superstition. That said, other divinatory methods like astrology appear to have clearer, potentially meaningful associative basis, which the current view on correlative inference tends to ignore.

The core philosophical insight here is well-illustrated by a quote of Shakespeare’s found in Julius Caesar, placed in the mouth of the Roman Senator Casca. Confronted with a series of strange and foreboding occurrences, Casca urges his fellow Romans not to explain them away as mere natural phenomena:

“When these prodigies do so conjointly meet, let not men say ‘These are their reasons: they are natural’; for, I believe, they are portentous things unto the climate that they point upon.” (Shakespeare, JC, 1.3.28-32)

This passage, I believe, captures a profound truth about the philosophy of signs. Its importance lies not necessarily in direct causality but in the pragmatic sufficiency of correlated signs towards a broader “climatic” shift that might otherwise be imperceptible. Shakespeare especially highlights how multiple seemingly unrelated signs, when occurring conjointly, often reliably indicate broader underlying shifts in “climate” — even if their causal relationships remain unknown.2 This introduces a broader philosophical framework for understanding signs.

Philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce and Augustine of Hippo have proposed influential taxonomies of signs, which help illuminate this framework. For the purposes of this essay, we will adopt a working distinction among three types:

• Natural signs are those in which a direct, necessary, causal relationship exists between the sign and the thing signified. These signs are not arbitrary but are grounded in a physical, or biological process. Smoke is a natural sign of fire; fever is a natural sign of infection. These signs depend on consistent physical or biological laws.

• Conventional signs are those whose meaning is not determined entirely by nature but at least in part by social agreement or learned association. Such signs are (at least in some sense) arbitrary. For instance, the word tree signifies a particular type of plant only because speakers of English have collectively agreed upon this pairing; the precise sound of the word “tree” would not necessarily be paired with its significance in English by a speaker of another language. Words, flags, and traffic lights fall into this category; their significance depends on convention and shared agreement rather than intrinsic connection.

• Statistical or indirect signs refer to patterns of correlation that, while lacking a known or necessary causal mechanism, nevertheless reliably track or point toward certain phenomena through their aggregate regularity. They emerge from patterns of correlation rather than causal or conventional symbolic relationships. These signs are neither grounded in natural necessity nor in social agreement, but in emergent regularities that allow for prediction and interpretation, even if the causal substrate remains obscure. It will be these signs which centrally concern us here.

In the view of Pierce and Augustine, with respect to what we now call statistical signs it remains logically true that correlation does not directly imply causation. Establishing causation demands rigorous isolation, testing, and metaphysical assumptions about nature that mere correlation lacks. Nevertheless, correlations — when strong, repeated, and multifaceted — can yield statistically significant predictive power. And this predictive power is often what makes causal knowledge of interest in the first place: it enables effective action and adaptive response in a world governed by complexity and uncertainty.

Hence, although the principle “correlation does not equal causation” is theoretically valid, in practical scenarios focused primarily on accurate prediction, correlation should not be casually dismissed. Indeed, as will be expounded in more detail later, this form of associative reasoning — without explicit causal explanation — closely mirrors the logic employed by Large Language Models (LLMs). An LLM does not explicitly understand grammar rules, yet it can accurately predict grammatical structures and generate coherent text through statistical pattern recognition across vast corpora of language. The astonishing success of these models at predicting the most appropriate or meaningful text-based response — given a linguistic or visual prompt — demonstrates that predictive accuracy does not always require causal comprehension; pragmatic reliability alone can suffice.

Nowhere is the interpretive potential — and the controversy — of statistical signs more enduring than in the case of astrology.

3. ASTROLOGY AS A MODEL CASE:

Astrology offers a particularly rich example of such associative reasoning. While birth under a particular constellation may not imply a direct causal influence from celestial bodies, the positions of stars and planets can serve as symbolic proxies — compressed indicators of environmental, geographical, temporal, and social variables known to shape human development. For example, scientific studies have found robust correlations between season of birth and various psychological and physiological outcomes, including increased incidence of schizophrenia, depression, and vitamin D deficiency (Torrey et al., 1997; Disanto et al., 2012). Birth order has similarly been linked to differences in personality, academic achievement, and long-term health (Sulloway, 1996; Barclay, 2015). Geographic location further influences health through factors such as diet, pathogen exposure, and environmental toxins (Diamond, 1997). In this light, astrological signs may be understood as historically evolved attempts to aggregate and interpret such distributed variables into a symbolic framework.3

All of these features are elegantly consolidated by the position of stars in the sky on a given night. The stars, then, are not direct causes of human destiny but function as indirect symbolic summations of complex information — geography, climate, season, birth order, and more — which can be used to accurately predict a variety of health, relationship, and life outcomes. In a nutshell, astrology can be a provably valid tool for prediction.

Does this imply we must adopt a metaphysical stance suggesting that stars directly influence human destinies or health outcomes through radiation, gravitational force, or other mechanisms? Not necessarily. From a scientific standpoint, the stars likely have negligible direct influence on human affairs. Yet rejecting the causal force of the stars does not entail rejecting their predictive utility.

In the language of Pierce and Augustine, the positions of the stars are best understood as “statistical but not natural” signs — they do not exert causal influence themselves, but can yield statistically robust predictions, even if they are causally inert themselves.

In fact – and this might seem surprising at first – this symbolic consolidation may enhance predictive accuracy beyond what any single direct influence could achieve on its own. Another way of thinking of this is that the stars function as compact proxies for a constellation of variables, and their significance lies not in what they do, but in what their patterned appearance summarizes — a distributed structure of meaningful associations that, taken together, point toward future outcomes with surprisingly valid precision.

Stated more formally, the predictive power of a perfect aggregate of many small direct signs will be of necessity greater than any of the aggregated signs considered individually, even if the aggregate sign is indirect. For example, a star position is (at least theoretically) a more predictive sign of health than (e.g.) geography, climate, or season alone, because the significance of the star does little more than comprise the predictive information of all of the smaller direct signs it contains. In this way, we can see that a well-constructed indirect signal, built from the collective weight of numerous smaller, direct indicators, can surpass the predictive capacity of any single one of those direct indicators.

This is a curious fact that deserves more attention, as it reveals a world of “emergent information,” uniquely accessible by what we have been calling divination -- “emergent” because the way these smaller direct signs combine and interact within the aggregate can reveal patterns or insights that wouldn't be apparent by looking at each sign in isolation. The "whole" of the indirect aggregate therefore can become greater than the sum of its direct parts in terms of predictive information. This is because the aggregate indirect sign could justify a prediction which would be insufficiently justified given any of the component direct signs. In such a case, valid predictions would genuinely “emerge” from mere symbolic consolidation.4

4. GENERALIZATION OF THE THEORY TO THE REST OF DIVINATION:

Some forms of augury, too, function as a convergent system of indirect signs.

In 2004, as the Indian Ocean tsunami approached, animals began exhibiting anomalous behaviors: elephants broke free and fled to higher ground, flamingos abandoned low-lying areas, dogs refused beach walks, and zoo animals sought shelter (Wadley and Borger 2005). These responses, occurring minutes before the disaster, suggest the animals detected environmental cues — seismic vibrations, pressure shifts, or infrasound — far beyond human sensory capacity.

Such signs, in isolation, might seem insignificant. But when observed together, they form a constellation of meaning. If a trained observer had noticed these correlated reactions, they might have predicted the coming tsunami — without understanding its precise cause. The animals, in effect, served as environmental sensors. By watching them, we access a layer of information otherwise unavailable to our senses. This, I argue, is the core logic of augury: not magic, but a method of mediated perception — where animals are best understood as distributed environmental signals, directly perceiving environmental causes beyond human sensory range, which humans infer indirectly by observing patterns and conjoint aberrations in the animals’ behavior.

The strange flight of a single bird may be dismissed as a mere aberration. But when dogs howl, elephants break loose, and flamingos fly for cover -- “When these prodigies do so conjointly meet, let not men say, ‘These are their reasons: they are natural. For, I believe, they are portentous things unto the climate that they point upon.” These are not mere omens in the superstitious sense, but aggregated anomalies, patterns that resist dismissal when read together.

In such cases, we would be unwise to dismiss these conjoint meeting prodigies as insignificant simply because we cannot articulate the underlying mechanisms. Rather, their meaning may not be in what they are, but in what they aggregate — the pattern they reveal when taken together. Augury thus becomes a kind of properly attuned ecological attentiveness, tuned to indirect signs whose convergence can reliably predict shifts in the broader system.

In like manner, practices like aruspicina (the reading of animal entrails), metoposcopy (the reading of facial lines), palmistry (the reading of lines and features in the hand), and dream-interpretation may (sic) also function as systems of indirect signs, rather than mere superstition.

In ancient contexts, anomalies in animal organs — such as discoloration, deformities, or asymmetries — were interpreted as omens. Today, we might understand such irregularities as potential indicators of environmental toxins, nutritional deficiencies, or disease exposure within a given ecological niche. For example, liver abnormalities in animals have been used as bioindicators of heavy metal contamination (Beyer et al., 1996), and amphibians with limb deformities have signaled the presence of endocrine-disrupting pollutants in freshwater ecosystems (Blaustein & Johnson, 2003). In this sense, ancient aruspexes may have, wittingly or unwittingly, engaged in a kind of environmental monitoring, reading the health of their world through biological irregularities.

Similarly, reading facial morphology and skin markings (crow’s feet, moles, and so on) — the focus of metoposcopy — might reflect underlying developmental or genetic stressors. For instance, minor facial anomalies such as wide-set eyes, low nasal bridges, or deep palmar creases have been statistically associated with prenatal alcohol exposure, genetic disorders, and hormonal imbalances (e.g., Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder; see Streissguth et al., 1996). What may appear as superficial or arbitrary markers can, when systematically observed, point to internal or systemic irregularities that would otherwise remain hidden.

A similar line of reasoning can be applied to palmistry, or palm reading, often dismissed as mere entertainment, touches upon legitimate lines of inquiry: dermatoglyphics — the scientific study of fingerprints and skin ridge patterns — has been shown to correlate with certain chromosomal abnormalities (e.g., in Down syndrome or Turner syndrome) and neurological development (Cummins & Midlo, 1961). Though such associations are probabilistic rather than deterministic, they echo the ancient belief that external form might reflect internal disposition or history, and (I argue) are justified by the same logic as the sciences listed above.

Freudian psychoanalysis follows a logic similar to that of augury: it treats recurring dreams, symptoms, and behaviors not as random events, but as indirect, symbolically encoded signs of deeper psychological realities. Dreams in particular are viewed as aggregations of subconscious emotional states — manifestations of repressed trauma, internal conflict, or unmet needs. The analyst’s task is to interpret these surface-level anomalies to uncover the concealed psychological dynamics beneath. This method, while often dismissed as speculative, has found at least some empirical support in contemporary neuroscience and clinical psychology (Hoffman, 2017).

Modern studies confirm that dream content is shaped by emotional salience, especially in conditions like PTSD. Trauma survivors frequently experience recurring dream motifs. Many report recurrent dreams in which they are unable to move or call for help, often in ambiguous or distorted settings -- ones which symbolically consolidate core emotional experiences such as helplessness or fear. Research shows these patterns correlate with symptom severity and diagnostic outcomes (Nielsen & Levin, 2007; Scarpelli et al., 2019). Neuroimaging further supports the link between dream formation and activity in brain regions governing memory, threat detection, and emotional regulation. Taken together, these findings suggest that dreams function as indirect psychological indicators, much like animal behavior signals environmental disruption. In both cases, meaning emerges not from isolated instances, but from the aggregation of signs that, when interpreted skillfully, reveal otherwise hidden truths.

Viewed in this light, these practices are not inherently irrational. They may represent early, intuitive efforts to systematize correlations between observable surface features and hidden physiological or environmental states. As with augury, their value lies not in mystical causation, but in pattern recognition: the aggregation of indirect signs that point toward underlying truths.

In contrast to more arbitrary or randomized methods of divination — such as tarot cards or bibliomancy (random verse-dipping) — these practices plausibly connect observable phenomena to real underlying causes, even if the causal pathways are complex or opaque. They invite us to see the world not as a set of isolated events, but as a system of symbolic surfaces where the visible may yet speak of the hidden.

5. GPT AS DIGITAL AUGURY:

Generative Artificial Intelligence, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT, offers a striking modern analog to the logic of divination outlined above. LLMs generate coherent and highly accurate predictions not (of course) by understanding grammar in any causal or conceptual sense, but by statistically modeling vast patterns in linguistic data. Despite lacking semantic comprehension, they routinely outperform humans in text generation and linguistic prediction. In this sense, GPT functions as a digital augur.

There appears, then, to be no principled reason why the theoretical framework developed here — applied to astrology, augury, aruspicina, metoposcopy, palmistry, and dream interpretation — cannot be extended to create a science of divination in general. If such practices are understood not as inherently mystical arts, but as empirical attempts to correlate indirect signs with future events or hidden states of affairs, then the logic of divination may be recast as a form of predictive reasoning. Indeed, LLMs, on this theory, offer demonstration of how divination can be expanded: the form of inference used in divination can be valid, even if the symbolic medium is causally inert.

In this light, divination is best defined not by its historical or esoteric trappings, but by its epistemic structure: wherever emergent information arises from the aggregation of direct signs into a symbolic pattern, and whenever that pattern reliably tracks real phenomena, divination is at work. It is the disciplined reading of conjoint anomalies — the interpretation of converging, non-causal signs that together point toward broader systemic shifts. Just as LLMs extract meaning not from individual words, but from patterns distributed across massive datasets, so too do traditional divinatory systems derive significance from structured convergence of signs in symbolic aggregates.

With sufficient modeling and refinement, such practices may eventually achieve the status of a formal sciences of indirect signs — fields grounded not in superstition, but in rigorous statistical insight. Just as astrology has been provisionally rehabilitated in the preceding argument, so too might the general method of divination be recognized as a legitimate, if still underdeveloped, epistemology of the emergent.

6. REASSESSING CORRELATION AND CAUSATION

For all that, it’s obviously still true that correlation does not equal or imply causation. Establishing causation requires more rigorous isolation and testing to establish more than mere correlation does, and may appear to suggest something about the metaphysics of nature which mere correlation simply does not.5

That said, correlation, if it is large enough, is sufficient to become highly predictive, and accurate prediction is a large reason why knowledge of causation is prized in the first place. That is, we care about causes in large part because they allow us to effectively navigate an uncertain world.

Hence, although the doctrine that correlation does not equal causation is always logically true, in certain cases (namely the ones outlined above), this fact is, practically speaking, irrelevant. We do, in fact, make successful predictions that allow us to navigate more successfully through the world, and we do so on the basis of actually observed correlations – usually without knowing the underlying causes.

Does this mean that we are obligated to suppose a metaphysics for astrology, wherein the stars, through a peculiar sort of cosmic radiation, directly influence our actions, destinies, and health outcomes? Not in the slightest.

Indeed, it is unlikely that there is any direct influence of the stars on human affairs. They are simply too far away, and for that reason, claims of direct causal effects have either not proven to be true, or positively proven not to be true. Nonetheless, the mere fact that stars do not directly influence human affairs, still allows that stars and constellations might be predictive of, e.g., human health and flourishing. One need only show that there is such a thing as an “indirect sign,” and that stars are just such “indirect signs.” Looking at the night sky in a considered way,6 we can access a bundle of information all of which we know have strong implications for human health. Indeed, since the stars effectively aggregate this information, it stands to reason that their position will be more predictive than any more limited array of information from geography, climate, or season, etc.

7. A NOTE ON OBJECTIONS TO CORRELATIVE REASONING:

Before generalizing further, it’s important to acknowledge why correlative reasoning has historically been viewed with suspicion — and under what conditions it might deserve cautious rehabilitation.

Correlative reasoning has long been vulnerable to misuse. Spurious correlations can arise purely by chance or from hidden confounding variables.7 Human cognition is notoriously prone to apophenia (the tendency to perceive patterns where none exist) and confirmation bias (where one selectively notices evidence that confirms existing beliefs). These psychological tendencies, combined with the misuse of correlative reasoning in pseudoscientific frameworks (e.g., phrenology, racial profiling, pop astrology), help explain the modern scientific aversion to associative methods lacking causal articulation.

Furthermore, correlative models often struggle with generalizability: what holds in one context or dataset may not hold in another. Without proper grounding or rigorous validation, these methods can become tools for self-deception, exploitation, or unfalsifiable ideology.

That said, the possibility of abuse does not preclude the possibility of proper use. In particular, correlative reasoning may yield valid insights when supported by:

1. Strong, repeated correlations across large and varied datasets;

2. Temporal and contextual consistency;

3. Redundancy, where multiple signs converge to support a prediction.

4. Replicability and Proven Predictive Validity Over Time

5. Cross-Domain Plausibility or Coherence, where predictions made are strongly compatible with known science in other domains.

These are precisely the conditions under which modern machine learning models thrive. LLMs make accurate predictions – not through causal modeling, but through statistical convergence across diverse contexts. In this light, divinatory reasoning can be reinterpreted not as superstition, but as an early attempt to detect and interpret indirect signs — symbolic aggregates that, though causally inert themselves, meaningfully encode causal structures.

What correlative reasoning demands is not rejection, but the right epistemic environment: large-scale data, iterative validation, and epistemic humility in the face of uncertainty.

8. IN FORMAL DEFENSE OF ASTROLOGISTS, PSYCHICS, AND DIVINERS:

The intuitive part of the human mind, referred to as System 1 by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, is characterized by its ability to produce rapid, automatic judgments in response to complex or uncertain stimuli. Unlike the slower, more effortful, and analytically rigorous System 2, System 1 operates with remarkable speed and efficiency, relying on pattern recognition and heuristic shortcuts. It excels in environments where decisions must be made under pressure of time or with incomplete information. However, its inner workings are largely opaque to conscious introspection. As Kahneman puts it in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), “System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” The conclusions it delivers often feel self-evident, even when their basis cannot be readily articulated.

Strikingly, this kind of cognitive processing closely resembles how Large Language Models function. Like System 1, LLMs use vast quantities of past data to make high-probability inferences without any transparent causal model or deductive logic. They are fundamentally black box reasoning systems — able to generate coherent, contextually appropriate responses or predictions based on prior examples, even if the internal logic of their decision-making remains inscrutable. Some cognitive scientists and AI researchers have suggested that LLMs in fact draw inspiration from neurological models of human language processing and statistical learning (Manning et al., 2020). In this view, LLMs operationalize a kind of externalized intuition — a computational approximation of System 1 that, like its human counterpart, can be extraordinarily effective without being necessarily explicable.

The relevance of this cognitive architecture to the present inquiry lies in its potential to explain the enduring presence and attested efficacy of astrologers, diviners, and psychics across a vast array of cultural traditions — from Jerusalem and Babylon, to India and China, to Ancient Greece and Rome. These practitioners were often credited with making remarkably accurate predictions or diagnoses based on patterns that eluded conscious explanation. If we hypothesize that such individuals possessed highly trained or unusually sensitive System 1 faculties, then their successes might be understood as intuitive responses to aggregated signs — indirect cues embedded in their environment or social context. Like LLMs or expert diagnosticians, it’s possible that they could have been detecting statistically meaningful patterns without articulating (or being able to articulate!) the causal logic behind them.

To this, natural language offers a compelling example of why humans intuitively navigate a system of signs in the first place. In Peirce’s schema, language is a system of conventional signs. Conventional signs occupy a conceptual space between natural (causal) and statistical (correlational) signs: words do not cause their own meanings, nor are they entirely statistical aggregations — but rather, they derive their significance from (ultimately arbitrary) socially agreed-upon norms and usage patterns.

Humans, especially in early childhood, are especially attuned to learn systems of such signs. They acquire language not through explicit instruction in grammar or logic, but by intuitively absorbing the patterns of speech they hear. This process is almost entirely non-conscious and heavily reliant on pattern recognition — learning what “sounds right” based on frequency and context, rather than abstract reasoning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) operate analogously: they process language not by understanding it in a human sense, but by modeling its conventional usage patterns through exposure to vast corpora. In this way, both human infants and LLMs acquire linguistic fluency not by learning rules per se, but by internalizing the probabilistic associations among signs. This convergence suggests that the intuitive grasp of symbolic systems — whether by human or machine — may rely on a broader, shared logic of sign-processing that transcends clear causal explanation. It is precisely this logic, I am claiming, that undergirds both natural language acquisition and pattern-based inference characteristic of divination.8

9. AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT, REPEATED:

While this essay argues that practices like divination, astrology, augury, and aruspicina do, in principle, rest on a sound scientific basis, this should not be taken as an endorsement of how these disciplines as they are currently practiced today, This essay is not defending astrology columns or late-night psychic hotlines. As I have already indicated, many contemporary forms of these arts conspicuously lack the scientific rigor and statistical discipline necessary to validate their claims, and do not even attempt to justify this lack of validation.

However, the central argument here is that such rigor could, in theory, be supplied by sufficiently powerful statistical models — such as Large Language Models or other forms of machine learning applied to the relevant domains of (e.g.) augury or astrology. It’s at least conceivable (in some cases highly conceivable!) that these ancient methods might be refined into something far more credible — as a kind of proto-scientific reasoning, ready for revival. It’s a call not for superstition, but for reformation: for the elevation of these old arts into a more rigorous and honorable science of signs.

10. CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A SCIENCE OF SIGNS:

In this essay, we have revisited the historically dismissed practices of astrology, augury, aruspicina, metoposcopy, and dream interpretation — not to mystify them as actually practiced but to clarify their latent epistemological structure. Rather than being merely irrational relics, many of these arts may in fact represent our own early attempts at structured inference from indirect signs. In dismissing these practices wholesale, modern science may have overlooked a class of reasoning that is predictively valid, even when not causally explicable.

We have argued that sufficiently strong correlation, though distinct from causation, can be pragmatically sufficient for accurate prediction. This insight is especially salient in the age of Large Language Models, whose architecture and performance mirror System 1 reasoning in the human brain: fast, intuitive, data-driven, and often inexplicable even to the reasoner themselves. If we accept such a mode of inference in our machines, we must consider the possibility that historical diviners and astrologers — especially in cultures like Jerusalem, Babylon, China, India, and Rome — may have used their own evolved, intuitive black-box faculties to detect patterns that modern science has only recently begun to quantify.

Just as LLMs predict not through understanding, but through attunement to patterned data, so too might a reimagined form of divination offer a pragmatic, probabilistic way of perceiving the world. What is required now is not belief, but experimentation. The call, then, is for collaboration — between data scientists, philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and scholars of religion and symbolism — to test the predictive validity of symbolic systems long considered unscientific. It may be that in doing so, we recover not only forgotten modes of insight, but new significance in our pursuit of knowledge under uncertainty.

11. APPENDIX: A PROPOSED EXPERIMENT:

To explore the central hypothesis of this paper – that divination is (or can be developed into) a valid science of correlative reasoning, and that these methods are currently effectively employed by LLMs and other machine learning algorithms – we propose an experiment: A machine learning system could be trained to correlate astrological ephemerides (birth dates, times, and locations) with health outcomes using longitudinal public datasets. The hypothesis: star position at birth will emerge as a statistically significant proxy for variables like seasonality, geography, and family dynamics — thus becoming a reliable indirect sign.

Specifically, our hypothesis would be that star position at birth will emerge as a statistically significant proxy for variables like seasonality, geography, and family dynamics — thus becoming a reliable indirect sign. Further, we predict that star position will be more predictive than any of the direct variables considered on their own. In this way, researchers could empirically test whether traditional divinatory frameworks like astrology hold actionable predictive value.

If validated, this would represent a rigorous reentry of symbolic divination into the empirical fold, with implications not only for the history of science but for how we understand human reasoning, past and future.

.

Artwork by Carin Yoo

Cole did his undergrad work in Classics and Philosophy at Harvard University and received an MS at Oxford (UK). He taught Ancient Greek at Oxford and co-founded Oxford Latinitas, a society of Oxford academics dedicated to reviving Latin and Greek in scholarly use. He now lives in New York City, where he co-organizes the NY Philosophy Club, and will be attending NYU in the fall to continue his work on Aristotle’s Philosophy of Science.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Primary Sources / Philosophical Works

• Augustine. On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana). Translated by D.W. Robertson Jr. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958.

• Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

• Monton, Bradley and Chad Mohler. 2021. "Constructive Empiricism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/constructive-empiricism.

• Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 2: Elements of Logic. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932.

• Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Edited by David Daniell. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 1998.

Scientific and Empirical Studies

• Barclay, Kieron. 2015. “A Quantitative Study of Birth Order and Health in Later Life.” American Journal of Epidemiology 182(8): 682–690.

• Beyer, W.N., D.E. Heinz, and A.W. Redmon-Norwood. 1996. Environmental Contaminants in Wildlife: Interpreting Tissue Concentrations. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

• Blaustein, Andrew R., and Pieter T.J. Johnson. 2003. “The Complexity of Deformed Amphibians.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1(2): 87–94.

• Cummins, Harold, and Charles Midlo. 1961. Finger Prints, Palms and Soles: An Introduction to Dermatoglyphics. New York: Dover Publications.

• Disanto, Giulio, Julian C. Morahan, George Ebers, and Sreeram V. Ramagopalan. 2012. “Season of Birth and Risk of Multiple Sclerosis: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.” BMJ 344: e675.

• Hoffman, Martin. 2017. “Psychoanalysis as Science.” In Thomas Schramme and Steven Edwards, ed., Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 925-945.

• Hofkirchner, Wolfgang. 2013. “Emergent Information. When a Difference Makes a Difference…” tripleC: communication capitalism & critique 11(1): 6-12.

• Nielsen, Tore, and Ross Levin. 2007. “Nightmares: A New Neurocognitive Model.” Sleep Medicine Reviews 11(4): 295–310.

• Scarpelli, Serena, Valentina D’Atri, Michele Gorgoni, et al. 2019. “Dreams and Nightmares in PTSD.” Sleep Medicine Reviews 43: 70–81.

• Sulloway, Frank J. 1996. Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. New York: Pantheon Books.

• Torrey, E. Fuller, John J. Bartko, and Robert H. Yolken. 1997. “Toxoplasma gondii and Other Risk Factors for Schizophrenia: An Update.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 23(1): 1–6.

• Wadley, Jonathan, and Julian Borger. 2005. “Tsunami Animals ‘Fled to Safety’.” The Guardian, Jan 3, 2005. URL = https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/03/tsunami2004.indonesia .

Cognitive Science and AI

• Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. 1979. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47(2): 263–291.

• Manning, Christopher D., et al. 2020. “Emergent Linguistic Structure in Artificial Neural Networks Trained by Self-Supervision.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(48): 30046–30054.

Premise: If we asked someone the question, “What is it to philosophize?” our interlocutor would answer (unwittingly) in their own familiar manner.

For instance:

— — Someone trained in the classical style of philosophizing would answer – classically. That is, like a clerk at a foreign bank, they would exchange the base question for questions of a different, ancient currency – conveyed perhaps in a Greek or Latin accent. Only thereby, as some philosophers like to say, would the question have “purchase.”

— — Perhaps such a person might respond after the style of Socrates, by dissecting philosophy’s definition. Or by the anecdotal use of words: “When people say this, they typically mean this set of references and referents, this denotation and that connotation, formally or informally,” etc.

Meanwhile, if we asked ourselves once again the question, “What is it to do philosophy?” – but this time, to someone oriented in a more modern discipline – they will answer the question in a modern manner.

For instance:

— — A Romantic might convey philosophy as an exercise of intellect configured with will and passion, such as to aim one’s self towards the infinite, by which one comprehends the paradox of subjective existence as a finitude located within the cosmic whole.

— — By contrast, a Pragmatist philosopher might consider philosophy to be mastering the tool set by which one evaluates values, choices, options; honing one’s use of reason in the service of practical ends.

— — A Positivist (or even a scientist) might deny there’s any such thing as philosophy beyond the philosophy of science.

— — Kantians would say it’s putting Reason against its own sword, critiquing Critique and analyzing Analysis, with one blasphemous stroke, in order to study its supposed metaphysical innards.

Recapitulation

Being philosophers, then, all these eminent figures would exchange your question for one of theirs, initiating a process of questions within their own discipline, in their own manner. They’d break the initial question, “What is it to philosophize?” into further sets of idiosyncratic questions, which would always already reflect its authors’ own philosophical nature – that is, the ways they already use their own language.

For instance:

— — A Romantic would ask you to recollect an experience of the Sublime, in a work of art or an encounter with Nature, and from the memory’s mood, progress from there.

– — A Pragmatic philosopher would retort by asking “What are the most optimal answers to this question for me to believe?” or “What is the most optimal idea of philosophizing I can construct for myself?”

And so on.

Each will demonstrate their answer through the manner of its procedure, because philosophy is an activity, of which to philosophize is its infinitive form.1 And it’s an activity of language.

Resolution

So then what is our own answer to that question? What inferences might we draw from these observations? We might ask the philosopher Martin Heidegger, from the pages of his book What is Called Thinking? In an elaboration upon Parmenides’ poem on Being, Heidegger makes a distinction between two Ancient Greek words, both having to do with language:

Logos, and legein.

— — Logos we might understand or define as a finished statement, the intended message and meaning imparted by an assembly of words chosen and arranged in a constructed order; a complete sentence, an act of speech, a proposition. Another way of defining logos might be: language in action, in use, put to work.

— — Legein, on the other hand, is what undergirds the logos, its conditions of possibility.

— — The word Legein itself derives from an Indo-European particle meaning “to gather”. We might understand legein in terms of all that gathers behind an act of speech or writing. Semantics and Grammar both are aspects of legein. Jointly, they make logos itself possible. They are like necessary rules, axioms, designations and agreements that prepare the ways they already use their own language -- in speech acts, communication, dialectic, and instruction.

— — In somewhat the same way that Peano axioms provide the ground for arithmetic, legein encompasses the ground for logic, as a kind of evaluation and verification of logos as possibly valid or sound.

— — And so when we ask “What is it to philosophize?” should we not be asking for philosophy to show itself, as just such an evaluation and verification of its chosen subject matter?

Here though arises a challenge.

— — As Kurt Godel has demonstrated, no axioms can prove themselves by virtue of the systems they propagate.

— — This means that logos cannot prove its own truthfulness, accuracy, validity, or soundness logically; logic cannot scrutinize itself, as if to suffice for mere faith when it comes to believing its own premises. Rather, such an operation would have to rest with legein.

Delineation

This line of thinking reaches the following conclusions:

A.

— — If Understanding is facilitated through Language, then if Understanding is to understand itself, it must also understand the nature of its own assigned Language.

— — Logic then is not the end-all be-all of language, but only the examination of how far our language can take us -- to the liminal boundary where (we imagine) legein crosses over into logos.

B.

— — We observe this precisely in the manner philosophers might respond to the question “What is it to philosophize?”

— — If we delve where we should, we will be lurking somewhere behind the scene, at the root of those responses, where whatever it is that words happen to be gathered by -- what grounds their construction of meaning. What lexicon, what bank of terms and words, and, stylistically, what syntax do they employ?

— — We are forced to employ indirect methods. We might survey the tenor and tone of our reply to the question, after the fact. Perhaps we imagine which connotations might carry a pattern. Or: what gets revealed in our body language? Any nervous tics or stock verbiage recur? What if anything might serve the role of axioms or metaphysical suppositions? What might be the psychology of this person, their class, their behavior, their values?

— — But where will this get us? Does it not land us back in that same crucible – back into the logic of scientific inquiry? All these guesses sound like the stuff of social science – the purview of linguists or behaviorists. In other words, back again to the use of language we presuppose already, but have not fully understood.

C.

— — See? The very question “What is it to philosophize?” is clever in that it prompts us to project the structure of our own assumptions and subsequent manner of thinking within the medium of language, the framing of our literal, constructed response, our finished propositions. For that reason, the very interpretation of the question itself beckons its own incidence of philosophizing: to ask about philosophizing is to philosophize, already.

— — We have not answered the question. Yet we’ve been proceeding as if we had. Once asked about the meaning of philosophizing, we’re just doing all this all over again.

— — So perhaps now we are beginning to see that insofar as Understanding must endeavor to understand itself, so too Questioning must question itself, must question what it is to Question, in order to expose its own horizon in its entirety.

— — And that’s a problem. Let’s see why…

D.

— — Philosophy, or so it seems, is a fancy term for the art and skill of questioning -- is questioning in itself, nothing less, nothing more. So it seemed to Socrates, who never much wanted to say what he knew.

— — And so began philosophy, and it was the luxury of thinkers in Antiquity to have lived at the beginning of History, and not in media res, a few millennia in the thick of it. (As indeed we are). They possessed no means for seeing themselves as philosophers partaking in a practice called “philosophy.”

— — As versatile as the ancient Greek literary arts were, their language was still in its generative infancy, limited to the few, and mostly employed for functional purposes. The ancients were not privileged to be holding a record so vast as ours today. Or better: they were not burdened by such knowledge (as indeed we are).

— — The Greeks had no earthly clue that their significance would endure for thousands of years (how could they?); or even how much can happen within a century, a decade, a year. And how would a Greek be able to appreciate properly what an astounding miracle it would be, that their example has persevered this long?

— — So too the data necessary for perceiving a language as a historical, organic, evolutionary, dynamic entity had yet to exist. The Socratic tradition did not develop a sense for the liminal. And if the Truth does lie in that domain, then all their struggles to capture the Truth were secretly doomed from the start.

E.

— — With this in mind, let us again ask ourselves: Why do we philosophize, if philosophical Questioning must so earnestly question itself, must question what it is to Question, in order to expose its own horizon in its entirety?

— — Any present-day philosopher, having read this far, must feel a sliding chill down their neck. For where is the limit of our questioning? And yet we keep asking.

— — If any philosopher of yore were resurrected today to see the outcome of history, would they not suffer a spell of despair? At all the books they did not have the opportunity to read, the works to absorb, the arguments to peruse, the ideas to accumulate, alas! No, they would feel just as Hegel describes the everyman in relation to Spirit: a puppet of the passions, a collateral existence perpetually at the mercy of the great wheel of History, and one more blood sacrifice at the altar of Reason. A stepping stone for a stepping stone.

— — “Philosophers,” in the most honorific sense, are stalkers – no, they are slaves – of Truth. They dedicate their lives to its exposure. But how many examples of existential embarrassment are required before they begin to Understand understanding in itself and never have to risk ourselves again? How many more of us will have to suffer the tarnishing of our legacies, reduced to fools in the eyes of our peers and progenitors?

— — Can there actually be a truth about questioning, one that can understand the questioning of questioning itself? There is no end to the questioning. Continuing is irrational. Why do we?

— — Just how much regard does this Lady Truth have for the cretins who obsess over attaining her – that succubus, that demon seductress who saps our strength the more we strive after her allure, even with such slender for hopes for success.?

F.

— — And here, in a way, we do reach the end. For here we might notice the shard of contradiction in the heart of philosophy, which raises our doubts to a high pitch.

— — Philosophy aspires towards Truth. It wishes to understand itself, for, as they say, the unexamined life is not worth living.

— — But the trouble with philosophy – the “love of wisdom” – is that it stands in its own way. The role it plays within the whole of Truth, insofar as it pursues the latter, becomes oblique to itself. A gap emerges in the Understanding, which it fails to recognize as its own recapitulated shadow, cast upon the whole of Truth.

G.

— — Either our stance towards the Truth will mirror our stance towards Life, or our stance towards Life will resemble our stance towards Truth. One way or the other, we will live in the contradiction between Truth and Life, lying and remaining unfulfilled.

— — It is to this relation between Truth and Life, and our being entangled in the middle, that philosophizing tends, and from it, arises. Both are absurd objects, unworthy of our love and devotion by Reason’s standards. Life is callous and cares nothing for individuals, while Truth commandeers them as pawns for her machinations, using their blood to grease the wheels.

— — From this point of view, it’s hard not to see that the role of any single particular questioner is expendable – yet the role of the questioner itself is anything but.

EPILOGUE

“We would reflect on language itself, and on language only. Language itself is – language, and nothing else besides. ‘Language’ itself is language. The understanding that is schooled in logic, thinking of everything in terms of calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical thing twice – language is language – how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already.

“This is why we ponder the question, ‘What about language itself?’ This is why we ask, ‘In what way does language occur as language?’ We answer: Language speaks. Is this, seriously, an answer? Presumably – that is, when it becomes clear what speaking is.

“To reflect on language thus demands that we enter into the speaking of language in order to take up our stay with language, i.e., within its speaking, not within our own. Only in that way do we arrive at the region within which it may happen – or also fail to happen – that language will call to us from there and grant us its nature. We leave the speaking to language. We do not wish to ground language in something else that is not language itself, nor do we wish to explain other things by means of language.

“On the tenth of August, 1784, Hamann wrote to Herder:

If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes I would yet have to do nothing more than repeat a single word three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this marrow-bone and will gnaw myself to death over it. There still remains a darkness, always, over this depth for me; I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.

“For Hamann, this abyss consists in the fact that reason is language. Hamann returns to language to say what Reason is. HIs glance, aimed at reason, falls into the depths of an abyss. Does this abyss consist only in the fact that reason resides in language, or is language itself the abyss? [...]

“The sentence, ‘Language is language,’ leaves us to hover over an abyss as long as we endure what it says.”

– Martin Heidegger, Language

Artwork: Heidegger, Nietzsche, Warhol

Logan Zelk, formerly of New York City, is a man of many words that cannot be condensed in a reasonable space. So, for reasons as unclear as Heidegger, he has instructed your editor to either include a mammoth and mouthy self-description that would be subverted by its own style, or else leave the description blank. But if it were left entirely blank, there would no indication of the fact that he will be heartily missed.

I once had a professor who would at all costs avoid telling strangers that he was a professional philosopher. As soon as he would utter “I am an academic philosopher,” the stranger would respond, “Oh yeah? Here’s my philosophy: [Insert moral slogan here].” Very often, philosophers in the United States receive, at best, a cold reception from Americans, in stark contrast to the Europeans’ general respect and curiosity regarding professional philosophers.

The New York Philosophy Club has a complicated relationship with philosophy. As non-professional enthusiasts, we may be passionately curious about professional philosophy, but we do not always heed the majority opinion we find there – though we might not always be clear why. Some of us may even be asking: What is professional philosophy even doing in the 21st Century? Why should we even read it? And how do we handle a disagreement between ourselves and the philosophers we read? The existence of the Philosophy Club opens a way to explore this.

Answering these questions with any nuance means balancing the progress to be found in the philosophical tradition with the disagreements we may find we have. And one complication is certainly the fact that there are technical skills that philosophers need to master before they can join in the discussion with any competence. And that takes practice. Philosophers are like bodybuilders. At the beginning we are like newcomers at a gym (with all the attendant feelings of embarrassment and quiet resolve to prove oneself). The muscles we exercise are what philosophers have called epistemic virtues, and exercising them takes commitment and practice because the problems of philosophy can be weighty indeed.

Epistemic virtues include curiosity, intellectual honesty, intellectual humility, imagination, and intellectual empathy. Acquiring them is difficult but not impossible, and that’s done just as it might be for any skill: we need to imitate the experts until we get it right.

Yet even a robust supply of these virtues is unlikely to suffice. The brute strength of a body builder alone will not carry anyone through life. Nor will sheer logical technique or private inspiration. One reason for this is surely the fact that solo adepts typically work in the world of the philosophical imagination, a world all one’s own. And they may forget the limitations this presents. Under such conditions it’s easy to miss the most salient features of real life. And if philosophy ignores the life we actually lead, then what good is it?

The other reason is just as surely the fact philosophy began in dialogue, and continues in the same manner. Even sequestered philosophers have imagined audiences, and publication is often seen as its professional reward because publication opens up one’s project to peer-review. Yet the community can provide a much more streamlined response as well, even before a philosophical paper takes more complete form. Late night conversations at the bar attest to the strength of joint effort, and to how important it might be to replenish the energies of the lonely philosopher.

Here is another way of putting this. Isolated philosophers are not experts. Experts are epistemic authorities. An epistemic authority is a person to whom a rational non-specialist might defer in matters pertaining to some particular specialty. When we defer to an expert, we are doing the wise thing because the expert (to the best of our judgment) is more likely to be correct on some particular matter. We are social, intellectual creatures after all. Given how complicated the world is, we could not possibly know it all. So, we rely on an intellectual division of labor, where we each can specialize in whatever field speaks to our proclivities and gifts. Just as we rely on our highly experienced plumbers and mechanics, so too we rely on knowledge-producers.

These days many of us probably began their own philosophical journeys under something like the slogan “Take nobody’s word for it” (Nullius in verba). This was the motto of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest association of scientists -- then known as “natural philosophers.” Originally this expressed the commitment of the fledgling community of scientists to set aside Church tradition and Aristotelian natural philosophy in the rigorous pursuit of truth. Given that our natural and social sciences are far more mature today, we share an even greater wealth of knowledge, method, and wisdom. So, we would do well to amend our slogan to privilege at least some experts -- who after all are people who not only know facts we cannot discover on our own, but also have embodied a knowledge of how the facts are discovered.

In some particular contexts, nothing is more pressing than to properly identify and defer to epistemic authorities. I once met a climate change denier who guffawed at the idea of deferring to climate scientists because nullius in verba. (I told him I was an aspiring philosopher of science.) He thought it was totally unphilosophical to defer to climate scientists. He thought that we ought to consider “both sides.” I was emphatic that climate scientists have already bothsides-ed the issue through definitive peer reviews.

As a fledgling philosopher of science, I too value consensus among both scientists and philosophers as an indication that it is likely that this group will have hit upon something true. The boundary between scientist and philosopher is a fuzzy boundary indeed, but this matter of authoritative consensus is one indicator of the boundary. All things being equal, we should probably defer to consensus among scientists more readily than among philosophers. Consensus among philosophers is more likely to indicate more the faddish influence of a social contagion than the consensus among scientists might. For example, I am a Christian, and I do not accept the consensus among philosophers on the question of theism. According to the 2009 PhilPapers Survey, around ⅔ of philosophers in the English-speaking world are functionally atheist. We should not downplay consensus among philosophers the way we might among our peers, but certainly large-scale determinants like culture, historical situation, and race may account for a shaky philosophical consensus.

Consensus is not of course the aim in itself. Truth is. And whether a particular consensus points in the direction of the truth or the bandwagon may be the crucial challenge for all philosophy. This is something that we in the NY Philosophy Club might want to take up!

Artwork: Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766)

Grayson McDowell completed degrees in Physics and Philosophy at Wofford College (‘24) in his home state of South Carolina. He is currently at Columbia University to continue pursuing the intersections of philosophy and physics. He loves to spend his leisure perfecting vegan cuisine, hanging out with his boyfriend Denahi, and soaking up nature.

One of the inspirations behind this journal is the opportunity it brings us to sustain and sharpen our own philosophical thinking, because it provides us a retrievable record of what others in our group think. Philosophy traditionally began in dialogue, and that remains true of doing philosophy even today, even if our discussion partners live only in our own imagination. But there seems no reason to keep our audience imaginary. They can respond to us right here. For that reason, recording our thoughts in writing might be a critical complement to simply talking it all out, if we are to do philosophy in the most meaningful way.

But then of course, that raises the question as to what “meaningful” philosophy
really amounts to. We value tolerance and diversity, and so we might not want to give too blanket an answer to such a question. In the spirit of Socrates, we might not even pretend to have an answer. And very often even Plato, who aspired to an answer beyond the limits of Socratic skepticism, had his Socrates character waver in his various responses to the key questions of his day

.

Yet on at least one point, “Socrates” seemed pretty consistent. We are told early on that Socratic wisdom lies not just in knowing what we don’t yet know. It also strives towards a better “knowing of one’s self,” as a starting point for cultivating a better life. Here is where philosophy, at least in the West, has traditionally envisioned its own beginnings.

So, as we continue to observe the springtime of this journal, we might find it useful to ask how this most famous Socratic injunction (“Know Thyself!”) suggests a direction for us here.

Yet even this suggestion of a possible direction might invite controversy. Those of us who share Buddhist or postmodernist sensibilities could balk at this (“contestable”) prospect of discovering the so-called “self.” But would it be wrong to say that even for Buddhists the notion of “self” plays an indispensable role? Even Buddhists (even Nagarjuna!) typically rely on two notions of “truth” (satya), one of which actually encompasses the fundamental elements (skandhas) we might recognize as our deeper (though temporary) selves. Surely some of these are more than just basic creaturely desires, and without them we could not even navigate through life. Some of us, for example, have deep ethical or political or religious convictions which at least appear to give meaning to how we live, and such core elements seem to percolate within our group discussions as well.

As Socrates knew, the best ideas often occur during the kind of dialogue we hope to have in our discussion groups, to which the gregariousness of our larger membership is an open invitation, and the recognition of someone else’s core beliefs can be what drives us to return in two weeks’ time – to hear spoken aloud some ideas we’d never seriously imagined before. How on earth (we might ask ourselves) could someone actually believe that?

So here we are in these meetings, like campers gathered around a fire, watching
the shadows of deeper ideas play across the dim light. And as the discussions
continue, once in a while we may find ourselves imagining something like inspiration breaking through. Later, we turn perhaps to journaling, to see if we can pin down those thoughts, and then wonder if we’re right about our suspicions.

Here's the point then. Even if we finally discover what seems most fundamental to us personally, Buddhists and others might urge us to detach from these discoveries. But should we not discover them first? Even if the Buddhists turn out to be right and letting go turns out to be a great virtue – how can we consciously renounce what we have not even realized we have? Otherwise it remains in our own subterranean sea, ready to cause us mysterious trouble.

So knowing oneself seems to be a requirement even of letting go of self. Otherwise
renunciation would count for very little, like a nefarious game of chess where losing the queen counts for nothing more than losing a pawn.

When we're putting forth our best philosophical efforts, then, we are not just shooting the breeze thoughtlessly. We are not, one hopes, just spouting off to hear ourselves talk, and we’re not just trying to impress our listeners. Are we not reaching for something more important than the rush of adrenaline? Are we not
reaching to express something more interesting and certainly more fundamental
to ourselves than that?

In attempting to discover our own core values, in all their diversity, perhaps here we find a common enterprise. This Journal stands ready to hear what your core ideas might be – or any other philosophical theme you find interesting and worth sharing.

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Artwork: Socrates from Raphael, The School of Athens

D. Seiple is the Chief Editor of the NY Journal of Philosophy. He especially enjoys symphony concerts and pre-postmodern art museums. He has a master’s degree in theology (Drew) and a doctorate in philosophy (Columbia), and his publications can be found on PhilPapers.

There are two famous inscriptions at the Delphi Oracle (the third is not famous). One is KNOW THYSELF and the other is ALL THINGS IN MODERATION or NOTHING IN EXCESS. Although Plato and Socrates highly regarded the first of these Delphic Maxims, know thyself, they did not praise the second aphorism.

Many translators of the more popular editions of Plato's Republic (and other dialogues) have used the word moderation to translate the Greek sophrosune, although I will argue here that it is not a good fit. Neither Plato nor Socrates can be said to have praised moderation in the way we understand that word today. Moderation is not one of the virtues as they described them. Sophrosune is more accurately translated as self-control or self-restraint, as the following citations will show.

The translation of the Republic by G.M.A. GRUBE and C.D.C. REEVE, included in the PLATO: COMPLETE WORKS edition, is typical in the use of the English word moderation to translate sophrosune. A discussion of this aspect of virtue is introduced at 390d and expounded on through 392 and then again at 430c through 432b, among many other sections.

At 390d Grube translates the initial explanation of sophrosune thus: “ and aren't these the most important aspects of moderation for the majority of people, namely to obey the rulers and to rule the pleasures of drink, sex and food for themselves?”

In order to make sense of this it is important to realize the underlying mechanics described herein. Socrates explained that the majority of people in this Republic will control their appetites first and foremost because their rulers, who they respect and trust, are telling them that it is good to do so. Their self control does not depend on them individually respecting the idea of moderation in all things. As we shall see, sophrosune actually includes instances when the rulers/educators have insisted that abstinence of some particular appetite is good, and we know logically that abstinence is never a part of moderation.

Christopher Rowe translates the same passage in a way that helps us to understand this better. “ The chief elements of moderation as it occurs in the generality of people will be these, won't they: being obedient to their rulers and being rulers of their own desires in relation to things like drink and sex and food.” Here, being rulers of their own desires clearly includes the possibility for abstinence and does not support the idea of moderation in the way that the second Delphic Oracle aphorism does.

To make this point more clear Socrates discussed the idea of starvation at 390b, stating, in effect, that sophrosune is absent in one who says “ death by starvation is the most pitiful fate.” But for one who believes that moderation is the virtue being discussed here (that sophrosune is accurately translated as moderation), starvation can legitimately be said to be a terrible fate. Being okay with starvation certainly requires tremendous self-control and is not helped at all by a respect in moderation. Socrates reiterates this point at 416a by saying that either hunger or lust can turn an untrained (that is, without sophrosune) guard dog into a wolf that eats the sheep.

Continuing in his discussion of sophrosune, Socrates states at 390d, “if there are words or deeds of famous men who are exhibiting endurance in the face of everything, surely they must be seen or heard.” This helps to further understand sophrosune, as described in Plato’s dialogues, as a form of endurance over conditions of lack rather than a respect for moderation in everything.

Socrates’ explanation of sophrosune does not stop there however, but goes on to expound on the implications of self-control and not moderation. And this, possibly, explains why it is often not accurately translated for an English speaking audience. At 390e he explains what sophrosune is not. Anyone who is a lover of money and can thereby be bribed with gifts lacks sophrosune because money allows such a person to serve appetites–which are the very thing that the rulers/educators have told us to be prepared to go without (as in the instance of starvation). If we love money we cannot love endurance of abstinence in regard to what money can buy. A love of money is, by necessity, a hatred of conditions in which food, drink, shelter or sex are unavailable or severely restricted. But one who has the virtue of sophrosune is able to endure these deprivations because they have a self-control that revolves around a trust in the commandments of their teachers and superiors. They will not resent a lack of food because they have been taught that it is unbeneficial to themselves to do so. This is far from the mechanics of moderation.

Socrates used the example of Achilles to drive this point home. He said that Achilles possessed sophrosune, and so he would never have taken bribes OR have showed disrespect to his rulers, the gods, both of which Homer described him as doing:

“We won't allow our people to believe that Achilles of all people, not only the son of a goddess and of Peleus, who was supremely moderate and grandson of Zeus, but also brought under [educated by] the supreme wisdom of Chiron, was so completely disturbed an individual as to have two opposing sicknesses in him: illiberality [apeirokalia] combined with the love of money, on the one hand, [and] a sense of superiority over Gods and men on the other” (from the Rowe translation).

So Achilles could not possibly have been influenced in his decision-making by the offer of money or gifts because he definitely had sophrosune, which would have given him an appreciation of not having money and not having the things it can buy. Through sophrosune he would have been able to control or restrain the bodily appetites that money supplies. And so, one with sophrosune won't take a bribe even if that bribe provides him with the means to live a moderate life with a moderate amount of pleasures of food, drink, sex, etc..

Other passages in the dialogues that also support this argument include Charmides 164d, where sophrosune is connected directly with KNOW THYSELF. NOTHING IN EXCESS is not at all mentioned. We should not think that because Protarchus mentions NOTHING IN EXCESS at Philebus 45e that this is Plato recommending it. There, in that dialogue, sophrosune is similarly explained as a type of self-control in which one can endure abstinence over certain types of pleasures that are called intense, and so are not beneficial.

In summary, within Plato’s dialogues, sophrosune is the self-restraint that people exhibit when they respect teachers/rulers who have told them that endurance of conditions in which the objects of our appetites are scarce or absent is very important to maintain. And this has very little connection to the English word moderation. So, we can safely say that when moderation is used to translate sophrosune within one of Plato's dialogues, a misunderstanding has occurred. Even though Socrates and his student Plato greatly respected the Delphic aphorism, KNOW THYSELF, they did not do so for the other famous aphorism engraved there: ALL THINGS IN MODERATION/ NOTHING IN EXCESS.

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Artwork: Plato's Academy Detail, Pompeii (1st cen A.C.E.)

Kilaya Ciriello is an author of books on Plato and Eastern philosophy having studied under the great British philosopher Stuart Hampshire at Stanford in the early 90's. He maintains a blog called The Fundamentalist Plato's Substack.

Tale 1: The Bush and the Bris

One moment, I am stalking a desert mouse through dry, sun-baked shrubbery, gathering myself to strike, and the next, I find myself in a cave.

Before me is a bush, lit without and within by a blur of shifting flames. They fill the cave with almost-shadows, as the fire dances here and there, obstructed only by burning branches. I flick out my tongue to taste the air; when I withdraw it into my mouth, I detect a sharpness, like the air itself is burning, but no smoke. It’s unlike any fire I’ve ever seen.

How did I get here?

Something moves behind me. I turn; a human! I rise up in a threat display, spreading my hood and baring my fangs. The human recoils away from me, as well he should. I hate all primates instinctively, but especially humans, those most deadly of prey and predators.

A sound rumbles the ground beneath me and the air around me. After a moment, I recognize it as speech, but it’s not coming from the human male before me. The voice seems to come from the cave at large. What’s more, I can understand it. “Pick it up by the tail,” it says.

The human cautiously approaches me, and I rear back, ready to strike. But for some reason, I don’t. He reaches fearfully for me, and with a dart of the hand takes hold of me, lifts me into the air. I want to attack him, but my body won’t respond. Instead I go stiff. His hot hand scalds my scales, his touch unwanted, but I do nothing. Can do nothing.

What is happening?

My body straightens, contracts, as the stiffness takes hold, tail first, then spreading toward my head. My breathing ceases, but my mind doesn’t go blank. My eyes cloud, my tongue hardens, but I can still sense my surroundings. More than sense; I can see things I couldn’t a moment ago.

A presence fills the cave. It emanates from the bush, although it doesn’t originate there; it rather seems to come from elsewhere, and merely enters this space through the bush. It suffuses the air, the walls, the ground. It spreads up through the man’s feet, washing over him.

The voice speaks, and I watch as the man puts his hand into his cloak. A piece of the presence swirls around the hand, afflicting it. The man withdraws his hand, stares at it, at the sores pocking it.

The voice continues to speak with the man, but I am distracted, because it is also talking to me. “Go with Moses,” it says, without the rumble of its speech with the man. “Be for him a channel of my power. Bring my wrath and my retribution against Egypt.”

If I could, I would show my fangs. But my mouth is firmly shut. I find that I have the words to respond. “I don’t know you. Who are you, to tell me what to do?”

A flash of pain fills me, as a rumble sweeps the cave. The voice is rebuking both of us now; to me, it says, “I am your Maker. You betrayed me in my garden a thousand years ago. Now is your chance to prove yourself reformed.”

Its garden? Oh…

Snippets of memory from another lifetime overwhelm me in turn. I am climbing down from a tree… I am talking to a woman, who is biting into a fruit… I am flying through the air, convulsing, bits of me shriveling away like they are dissolving in acid…

A thousand years?

The memories strike me like whiplashes. Hunting vermin to stay alive. The grit of the earth in and on and between my scales. Death, again and again, in raptor claws and badger fangs and beneath human heels. A millennium of fear and anger and hunger and hatred and pain.

“You took everything from me!” I shriek. “I will never help you!”

The voice laughs, deep and self-assured. “Everything you had was mine from the start. All of this world belongs to me. Do you think you can escape my will?”

The air around me trembles.

“My punishment?”

I feel as though I am on fire. As though my substance is glowing coals, as though I have been smoldering all this time.

If I could, I would slither away in shame and fear. But I am still wooden in Moses’s hand.

***

Moses walked out of the cave, supporting himself on his staff with trembling arms. “Shit, shit,” he mumbled to himself. “God chose me? Me? What can I do? I’m nobody. I’m nothing.”

“Take hold of yourself,” sneered a voice.

Moses glanced around wildly, seeing no one. But with the recent experience of God’s disembodied voice, he recovered quickly. “Who’s there?” he called, leaning heavily on his staff.

“Look to your hand,” the voice said.

Moses looked at the hand that had recently been plagued with sores. He splayed it out, turned it about, but it seemed normal now.

“No, stupid, your other hand.”

Moses passed the staff to his left hand and looked at his right in the same manner. “Hello?”

The voice sighed. “The staff, fool, the staff.”

“Oh,” said Moses. “What?”

Before his journey into the cave, the staff—a gift from his father-in-law—had been a plain, unadorned length of mostly straight wood a head taller than Moses, worn particularly where the hand took hold of it. The head of the staff curved over to form a hook, useful for catching a straying sheep by the neck or leg.

Now the staff undulated gently from its pointed bottom end to the still-curved head. Its whole length featured intricately carved scales like a snake’s, down to the wide, flat belly-scales. The head was now a cobra’s, hooded, curving over severely until the neck pointed straight down, with the snake head raised, pointing out almost horizontally.

“Did you talk?” Moses addressed the staff.

“Obviously,” he heard, though the staff was still. The voice seemed to come directly into his head. It was quieter than God’s voice in the cave, and rather sinister.

“How are you talking?”

The staff chuckled mockingly. “Aw, is the poor human confused? Are things not making sense to him?”

“Hey, shut it,” Moses retorted. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“Indeed.” The staff turned toward him, his own hands moving it as though without his volition. “Can you really think God has chosen you?”

“I mean, I know I don’t deserve it—”

“No kidding.”

“—and I told him that, but he insisted. So, yeah. I guess he has.”

The staff tsked. “For now, perhaps. But he’ll discard you as soon as you are no longer useful.”

Moses hesitated, but shook his head. “He’s the God of my ancestors. All of our men are circumcised to him. We’ve stayed loyal, and he’s come back to save us.”

“How long have your people been slaves? How many hundreds of years? Why wait until now?”

“Well…” Moses’s mouth twisted, but he shrugged. “I don’t know.” He started walking again, making his way down the stony hill toward the desert plain. “But he must have his reasons.”

The staff scoffed. “You’re too trusting. Can’t you see that he’s manipulating you?”

“But why?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s never good, with him.”

“You don’t know, do you? You’re as clueless as I am.”

“Be quiet,” it snapped. “You’ve no idea what I know.”

Moses burst out laughing, surprising himself. “You’re a wooden staff! What could you possibly know?”

The staff chuckled darkly and seemed to vibrate in his hand. “I am far older than you can fathom. I walked with your God in his Garden before the first of your kind spoke his first word. I knew him as you never will.”

“A piece of wood? Walking?” Moses’s hand was going numb from the vibration. He clutched the staff tighter.

“Fool. I was a snake before I was a staff.”

“And walking?”

The staff stopped vibrating and made a disgusted sound. “You know nothing.”

“I know God said to go to Egypt. Who am I to argue?”

“No more of a man than you seem.”

“Are you insane? I’m going!”

The staff didn’t say anything, but the way the sun glinted across its face, it seemed to roll its eyes.

Moses shook his head. “I’m talking to a stick,” he mumbled. “What do I expect?”

***

Moses’s wife Zipporah looked up with horror from the sleeping baby in his swaddle. “You want to leave now? Are you nuts? I’m barely up from the delivery bed!”

Moses winced and looked around their tent, abashed. He had just told his wife that they would be traveling to Egypt tomorrow. To say the look on her olive face was stormy would fall well short of the mark.

“It’s a mission from God,” he insisted. “To save my people from slavery.”

“I don’t care if it’s to save the entire world from demons!” Zipporah snapped. She advanced on Moses, the aggressive gesture hobbled somewhat by her wincing, swaying walk. “We’re not—” She sighed in discomfort. “Pass me your staff, would you?” she said tightly.

“Um—” Moses glanced at the staff, leaning against the heavy fabric of the tent wall; facing Zipporah, it almost seemed hungry. He didn't trust the staff himself, even if God had blessed it. It might not be safe for anyone else to handle it. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

Zipporah stood with her mouth open. Her expression passed through anger (“Not a good—” she began to exclaim) on its way to an ashen exhaustion. She teetered. Moses rushed forward to support her.

She neglected to thank him, but leaned against him, panting, for a few seconds. She looked up at her husband. “How are we supposed to travel? I can barely walk. You were going to circumcise the baby tomorrow. Do you propose we care for a weakened infant on the way to Egypt, and a lively toddler?” The unnamed boy fussed in his sleep, as if to illustrate her point. The toddler, fortunately, was with his grandfather.

“We have donkeys,” Moses pointed out. He led her past the pile of pillows on the rug to a cushioned stool. “Besides, we can—”

“No, something with a back,” Zipporah pleaded.

Moses leaned down to grab a pillow. “We can wait to circumcise him until we get there,” he continued, bringing her to a different seat and padding it. “I think God would rather we get a move on.”

“My father has donkeys,” she shot back, as her husband helped her into the chair. She took a moment to catch her breath. “And you won’t catch me riding for another week.”

“Zipporah, we have to go,” Moses said. “God chose me, specifically! I have to do this!”

“Then do it!” She waved him away. “Go!”

Moses knelt before her. “I want you with me.”

“Then wait a week!”

“When God says do something, he means now.”

She scoffed; he took her hand. “Zipporah, please. You’re my family. The Israelites are my family. Do I have to say any more?”

She shook her head, disbelieving. “Moses… I just gave birth.”

“You gave birth to a boy. I have to help God give birth to a nation.” Moses bit his lip. “Look. Can you imagine how important this is? We have a chance to be a part of something truly great. To do God’s will, right from his own mouth.”

“God can wait a week. We can travel when I’ve healed. When our son has healed from his circumcision.”

Moses shook his head. “We’ll circumcise him later. My first duty is to follow God’s command.”

“But why now? God has nothing but time.”

“Zipporah—”

“Your first duty is to the family you’ve created, Moses. We’re waiting.”

***

“To have spoken with a god! How I envy you!” Moses’s father-in-law was ecstatic. “Of course you’ll go at once! Take a donkey. Take two! And provisions! Enough for your whole family!”

***

We’ve been traveling for days now. Moses’s father-in-law Jethro saw us off, Moses and his small family, despite Zipporah’s objections. Jethro took an interest in me. He tried to use his powers to examine me, but I was able to repel him. I’m not sure how. I can feel my own powers growing, as though they are returning, like a regenerating limb.

We’re at a communal camping site for the night. Moses is sleeping now. He and his wife are in their tiny traveler's tent, huddled with their children for warmth. One of their donkeys is tethered at a tree nearby. Moses has leaned me up against the tree like a simple tool.

I hate this man. There’s nothing special about him. He’s just some shepherd. On what basis has God chosen him? How dare he command me?

I’ve been remembering more about my past. I remember the garden. I remember the humans there, who betrayed me, who cost me my legs. Who reduced me to a common animal.

I will not allow Moses to use and discard me.

I must be free of him. But I am stuck in this form. Or am I?

It’s an interesting sensation, being a piece of wood. There’s a stasis, a suspension of being. Yet I am still of a living thing. There’s a memory of treeness in my grain. A memory of growth, of flexibility and change.

Concentrating, I try to tap into that feeling of growth. That feeling of extension, of becoming more than I have been. I can feel it working. The tip of my tail twitches, my jaw flexes, my hood ripples.

Starting with my head, my flesh loses its stiffness. I lean more and more against the tree, as my suppleness spreads downward. My muscles creak as they change from plant to animal, as they expand and lengthen, then they go silent. It takes some moments before I am limber enough to move about.

First I coil on the ground, resting. Gathering my strength. I’ve been a staff for days. I spend a few minutes remembering how to be a snake.

The ass has been growing agitated, stomping, tossing its head, braying. It’s going to wake the humans. I bare my fangs and strike it in the throat, pumping it with venom before I release my bite. The animal staggers, its call hoarsening and going quiet as its throat swells. It gasps airlessly and falls to the ground. It will struggle to stay awake, now, as the venom spreads through its veins. It will take a while to die.

Your turn, Moses.

I turn away from the dying donkey and wend toward the humans. I don’t care about the woman and children; I hunger only for my enslaver. I hunger for Moses.

Fitful cries escape the tent as I approach. The infant has woken, and is demanding something from its mother. Humans are so weak in their youth. Snakes are independent as soon as they hatch, but humans spend months completely immobile, unable to do more than cry for help.

Patience, little one. I’ll give you something to cry about.

I slip my head in through the tent flap. The two adults are facing each other, feet toward the opening, with their children between them. The woman is stirring as her infant cries. I ignore them, rear up above Moses, against the fabric of the tent roof, and tense to strike.

But I don’t. Just like in the cave, when I try to attack Moses, I can’t. I hiss in frustration and try to whip myself down on him. But my body refuses.

Fine. If I can’t hurt Moses, then I will destroy his offspring. I eye the older child, sleeping soundly in his father’s arms, and move to strike.

Again, nothing happens.

Gah! What is this impotence? I am powerful, my very body a weapon, and yet I cannot so much as touch these people! I lash out at the tent itself, pierce the fabric with my fangs, and rip a hole in the roof.

*

Zipporah lay still, eyes wide, clutching her unnamed babe, as the serpent reared over first Moses, then her eldest Gershom, without actually attacking them. Only when it tossed in rage and struck the tent did her throat unstick and her cry escape.

*

A woman screams. Moses’s wife has come awake, and flees the tent, the fussing babe in her arms. I turn and pursue them, winding between the tents of other travelers, following the limping woman out beyond the circle of torches.

I gain steadily. She is only a few cubits ahead of me when she trips, falls to the ground. As she hits, her infant slips from her grip and rolls an arm’s-length or two. She reaches for it and shouts in horror, matching its heightened squall. How terribly annoying.

I pass the woman to strike at the child, and finally, finally, I succeed. I latch onto its head, my fangs sinking into its cheeks. I don’t bother to wait for the venom to take hold, but proceed to swallow it at once.

“Let him go!” the woman yells as she beats me about the head with her fist. But I ignore her. What can she do to me? Her other hand clutches the child’s skull, trying to keep me from advancing, but I pulse my mouth forward, bit by bit.

“Zipporah!” comes a shout from the tents. “Baby boy!” Moses rushes at us and falls upon me, grabs me by the tail. He smacks it against the ground. “Be you wood again!”

I want to laugh him off, but a force pushes into me where Moses holds my tail. Against my will, I can feel myself obeying. My tail flicks once and goes still, the stiffness again traveling toward my head, my body shrinking as the wood hardens.

“Moses!” the woman screams. “The baby!” For the child is entirely within my jaws. Her arm, too, is in my mouth, just beyond the elbow.

“By he that was, is, and shall be,” bellows Moses, “let him go!”

With that shout, I can feel his will pushing against mine. My lower tail, already returned to staff stuff, conducts his command into me. I stop swallowing the baby and its mother’s arm, but I dig my fangs into her bicep and begin to inject—

“Stop!” I freeze at the iron in Moses’s cry, unable to envenomate her.

“Let me go!” I protest. “Unhand me!”

“Release my son!” he shoots back.

Nothing doing. I’m taking his offspring with me. The woodenness continues to spread up my body.

*

“Moses! Do something!” Zipporah wailed.

Sharp pains tugged at her arm where the snake’s fangs entered it, as her husband beat the wooden lower part against the ground. “Leave! My! Son! Attack! Me!”

“It tried! Moses, it couldn’t harm you! Or Gershom!” Zipporah gasped. “The circumcision!” Her eyes jerked about, and her gaze fell on a sharp stone. She grasped it. “Open its jaws!”

*

My vision is obscured as Moses pries my jaws apart. My fangs leave the woman’s arm. I would thrash my tail, but the best I can do is twist my lower staff to clank upon the ground. I feel her reach inside with her other hand. Moments later, blood trickles into my throat.

“Join your bloody covenant!” she cries.

I spasm. Suddenly my prey is choking me. Snakes cannot cough to expel a faulty meal, but I do my best to pull away from the woman. Still held along its mother’s arm, the child slides from my jaws.

*

“Join your bloody covenant,” she gasped again, clasping her silent baby to her chest and slapping him on the back. She pulled him away to look at him, and gaped in horror. His face was purple, marred with bite marks upon the cheeks. “Moses!” she screamed. “It bit him!”

*

Moses lifts me to his face and shakes me. “Help my son!”

What an idea! “Do you think venom heals venom?” I chortle at him.

He stares at me as the madness drains from his eyes and his gaze bores into mine. His hands shift along my shaft, one just under my head, the other halfway down my length. His eyelids slide closed, squeeze tight.

I can almost see his thoughts as his eyes swivel. Impressions of the cave, of the leprous rash on his hand. “Not by your power,” he whispers, “except that which God has given you.” His eyes fly open, and he thrusts me at the child. “Heal him!”

For the first time, I don’t want to resist. I don’t want to disobey. For the first time, Moses’s desires seem to make sense to me. His will is mine.

“Heal him,” I respond.

My wooden mouth opens, baring my fangs. The bite marks on the baby’s cheeks begin to glow with a soft white light. The swelling goes down, the purple fades.

*

Zipporah’s arms trembled as her baby’s face lit up. She held her breath until he began to cry again. Then she clutched him fiercely to her breast. “Oh, Eliezer,” she murmured, naming him: “my god is my aid.”

***

Moses walked along the foothills of a small mountain, leading their remaining donkey. His wife and children were piled on its back, along with the bulk of their provisions. The rest Moses carried on his person, for want of the donkey the snake had killed. They would arrive in Egypt tomorrow.

Moses worried what his brother Aaron would say. Would he be glad to see him? God had promised he would, but it had been so long since Moses had fled, and he had barely known his brother. Moses had grown up in the palace, free from the suffering of his kin. Would Aaron resent him? Would they even recognize each other?

“Oh, stop worrying,” the staff said. Its voice was tired and raspy. “You’ll be fine.”

Moses regarded the staff warily. It hadn’t said anything since its murder attempt two nights earlier. Zipporah had wanted him to destroy it, but he’d told her it was part of God’s plan. “You’re talking again.”

It made no reply.

He glanced back at the donkey; Zipporah seemed to be dozing. “What’s your angle?”

“What do you mean?”

“First you try to kill my infant son, and now you’re offering reassurance. What gives?”

It sighed. “Don’t take it personally. It’s not your fault you’re worthless.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No problem.” The staff was silent for a while. “God put us together for his own reasons. Remember that. He doesn’t care about any of us.”

Moses shook his head. “He’s sent us to free my people. Clearly, he values us.”

“A goat kid may be valued at two shekels, all the while it is bound for slaughter.”

Moses shook his head, but didn’t answer. A figure had appeared in the distance. Moses shaded his eyes. “Do you think that’s Aaron?”

“Point me toward him.” Moses raised the staff. After a few seconds, it said, “I don’t know what he looks like.”

“Oh, haha.” Moses dragged the base of the staff lightly for a moment, letting it catch and bounce.

“That doesn’t hurt, you know.” The staff’s tone was conversational.

“I figured,” Moses replied. “We’ve got things to do.”

*

Things to do. Indeed.

I told Moses he’s worthless, but I’m no longer certain of that. He was able to access a power I didn’t know I had, overwriting my will, undoing what I’d done to hurt him. Protecting his child.

Maybe there’s more to this man than I judged. A family man, a man of the people. And able to command me. Maybe he can rise to his task. God thinks so, anyway.

Humans aren’t all bad. After all, wasn’t I trying to help them in the garden, expand their horizons? Maybe I won’t kill Moses after all.

But God is another matter.

.

Artwork by Emily Kruse

Yossi Katzin grew up religious, and struggles to find meaning in an existence with a missing meaning-giver. He hopes you have a good day, but would like to remind you that if every moment were good, we'd never grow.

Not long after writing this note in my journal, I learned that this experience has a name. It is described as alienation, existential estrangement, and more. Even more surprisingly, in existential philosophy, it is considered a fundamental mood that reveals something profound about our being. How had I never heard of this? Why had no one ever discussed it? And why, after experiencing this sudden jolt out of my everyday familiarity, did I instinctively try to push myself back into “normal life”— even feeling as if I should see a neurologist?

Heidegger calls this feeling Angst (anxiety) — but not in the everyday sense of fear tied to a specific object. Instead, Angst is a deep existential state that exposes our nothingness. The moment you feel disconnected from something that was always familiar is the moment you glimpse the truth of your own existential void. Is that exciting? You might think not — it sounds depressing. But from an existentialist perspective, it is actually the beginning of something crucial: the realization of your absolute freedom. There is nothing predetermined, and you are entirely free to define and create meaning.

Sartre calls this experience Nausea or Anguish — the moment you become aware of your radical freedom and the overwhelming responsibility that comes with it.

So, the next time you have that strange sensation — the moment when a familiar object or concept suddenly feels unfamiliar — don’t suppress it. Treasure it. Reflect on it. You are brushing against a fundamental theme in existentialist philosophy.

Sanam is a philosophy enthusiast and an immigration attorney by day, delving into philosophy books after hours. Born and raised in Tehran, she loves exploring the connections between classical Persian poetry and Western philosophy.