While writing Awake Blissfully, I have found myself returning to a rather old philosophical problem, and to a remarkably small word which we employ so casually that we scarcely notice what it asks of us. The word is is. We say that a thing is genuine, that a person is trustworthy, that a memory is accurate, and that a room is exactly as we remember it. These little declarations settle matters with magnificent efficiency. The question is whether the world has actually agreed to the settlement.
It is not the word itself that troubles me. Language would become quite intolerable if every description required a philosophical enquiry before we were permitted to finish our breakfast. What interests me is how effortlessly a description can begin to resemble a fact, how an interpretation may acquire the authority of an object, and how a thing can change whilst we continue assuring ourselves that it remains precisely what it always was.
The ship that survived its own replacement
Plutarch recounts how the Athenians preserved the ship associated with Theseus. As its timbers deteriorated, they removed the damaged pieces and replaced them with sound wood. Repairs were sensible enough; nobody would have admired an historic vessel more greatly because its planks had become rotten. Yet the practice produced a question which has outlived the ship itself. If the boards were replaced one by one, until not a single original timber remained, was this still the ship of Theseus?
There is a persuasive argument for saying yes. The vessel was never abandoned and replaced by another in a single afternoon. Its history continued uninterrupted; it occupied the same place within the life of the city, was cared for by successive generations, and remained recognisable as the object they had inherited. But the opposing argument is equally troublesome. If every material piece has disappeared, what precisely are we identifying when we insist that the ship is the same? Its shape? Its function? Its name? Its history? Or merely our determination to preserve the connection?
Thomas Hobbes subsequently made the puzzle even less comfortable. Suppose somebody had collected all the discarded timbers and eventually reassembled them into a second vessel. One ship would possess the continuous history of repair, while the other would possess the original material. Which of them could now claim to be the ship of Theseus? We cannot settle the matter simply by pointing towards the wood. Both vessels have something compelling to say in their defence, yet they cannot both be numerically the very same object.
The question is commonly asked in terms of removal, but I find its opposite just as interesting. How much can we add before a thing becomes something else? Give the ship another deck, a different stern, taller masts, unfamiliar machinery and an entirely new purpose. At what point does improvement become transformation? A single new plank seems harmless. So does the next. Yet there may come a morning when the vessel we once recognised has become strange to us, and we are unable to name the particular addition responsible. There is no universal number of planks at which identity must surrender.
The little tyranny of ‘is’
Consider the sentence It is morning. It seems so straightforward that examining it might appear an extravagant waste of time. Yet morning is not a material object waiting beyond the window to be collected and labelled. It is a period we identify through the movement of the Earth, the appearance of daylight, the habits of our bodies and the conventions by which we divide time. Civil clocks, astronomical events and the ordinary experience of waking need not agree at every moment. For somebody working through the night, morning may have begun while the streets remain dark. Elsewhere, daylight may arrive long before a person is ready to concede that the night has finished.
None of this renders the word morning meaningless. Its usefulness is beyond dispute. What it shows is that the apparently simple declaration conceals the conditions under which we have decided it applies. The tiny word is makes the whole arrangement sound self-evident. It does not tell us which definition we have chosen, where we are standing or why we believe that one boundary ought to matter more than another.
We do something similar with people. He is a scholar. She is a liar. This man is a failure. A single sentence may convert a passing judgement into something resembling a permanent identity. Repeat the judgement often enough and it begins to determine which details we notice, which we dismiss, and what we subsequently permit ourselves to believe. The word has not changed the person’s bones or breath, but it may alter the shape of the life others allow that person to inhabit.
Is it blue in the darkness?
Now imagine a small blue object resting upon a table. In daylight we look at it and confidently declare that it is blue. Then we close the curtains, extinguish the lamps and remove every available source of light. The object remains where we left it. Its material structure has not been altered, and its surface retains the characteristics through which it ordinarily reflects some wavelengths of light more readily than others. Yet in complete darkness there is no reflected light reaching our eyes, and therefore no visible blue for us to experience.
So, is the object still blue? In one perfectly reasonable sense it is. We are speaking about a stable property of the surface, or its disposition to appear blue under suitable illumination. In another sense there is no blue appearance at that moment, because the conditions required for seeing it are absent. We have not discovered a contradiction in physics. We have discovered two different meanings concealed beneath one remarkably confident sentence.
What we call blue is associated with a relatively narrow portion of the visible spectrum, often described as wavelengths around 450 to 490 nanometres. Even visible light itself occupies only a narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But a surface is not blue merely because a particular wavelength has been written against it in a textbook. Its appearance depends upon the illumination that reaches it, the wavelengths it reflects and the visual system through which the reflected light is interpreted. Change the lighting and the same object may look quite different. Remove the light entirely and its visible colour disappears, although the surface has not been repainted.
The distinction seems almost pedantic until we consider how frequently we confuse what belongs to a thing with what belongs to our encounter with it. We say the object is blue when, more precisely, we are making a reliable but conditional judgement about how it behaves and appears. We are not obliged to abandon that judgement. We might simply remember that the conditions of observation have quietly accompanied it all along.
What we add to a memory
Objects are difficult enough, but human recollection introduces another kind of ship. An experience occurs; afterwards we remember it, describe it to a friend, recount it to somebody else, and return to it years later with the intervening years pressing upon every detail. We may have forgotten an expression, supplied a motive, borrowed a phrase from another person’s account or given the entire occasion a significance it never possessed at the time. Not every addition is dishonest. Memory is an activity of a living mind, not a sealed cabinet containing photographs which remain untouched until required.
Yet the resemblance to the repaired vessel is uncomfortable. We remove what no longer fits. We replace an uncertain recollection with a more satisfying explanation. We add a detail because it seems necessary to make the sequence intelligible. Eventually, the story may be more coherent than the original experience ever was. At what point did it become a different story? And if a person has lived with the revised version for decades, can we simply return the missing pieces and expect the original experience to sail back into harbour?
The same difficulty attaches to written accounts. A document is copied, abridged, annotated, quoted and interpreted. A later writer supplies context; another corrects the chronology; somebody else turns an objection into a footnote. Each addition may be defensible in isolation, even helpful. But what survives after generations of such attention? An original testimony, or a vessel built around an absence? There is a difference between evidence and the account we have constructed from it, however beautifully the latter has been assembled.
These are some of the questions that accompany me as I write Awake Blissfully. Without discussing its plot, I can say that I am interested in the tension between observation and interpretation, between the apparent authority of a record and the much less orderly experience of the people who encounter it. Fiction allows such questions to remain alive without requiring the narrator to deliver an answer on behalf of the reader. Sometimes the most revealing thing about a statement is not that it proves false, but that we never thought to ask what its certainty depended upon.
The Fool, the Magician and the changing self
My long interest in Tarot and Hermetic philosophy has given me another way of considering this problem. I do not approach the cards chiefly as instruments of fortune-telling, but as images through which philosophical questions can be examined. The Fool remains recognisably the Fool upon the card, even when the person studying it is no longer the person who first encountered that image. At twenty, the figure may speak of possibility, recklessness and an untravelled road. After decades of living, the same figure may suggest experience, loss, courage or the strange necessity of beginning again. Neither the ink nor the card has altered. The observer has.
Alchemy introduces a related difficulty. If transformation is genuinely transformative, what becomes of the person who began the work? We speak of refinement, purification, dissolution and integration, but those words should not be allowed to conceal what change actually demands. If every belief we once considered indispensable has been examined, if habits have been abandoned and unfamiliar convictions have taken their place, how much of the original self must remain before we can declare that we are still the same person? And how much can be added to an identity before its apparent continuity becomes another carefully maintained story?
I do not regard these as arguments against growth, spiritual practice or the possibility of understanding ourselves. Quite the contrary. They make the act of transformation more interesting, and perhaps more demanding. We need not invent a miraculous new self in order to recognise that an older one has altered. Nor must we insist that every change is evidence of progress. Even a beautiful new timber may be fitted badly; even a convincing philosophy may become a prison if we allow it to answer questions we have not yet properly asked.
What remains when we have finished naming?
It would be easy to carry this uncertainty too far and conclude that nothing can be known, that every description is merely an opinion and every fact a convenient invention. I do not believe the Ship of Theseus requires such an extravagant surrender. The condition of a plank can be examined. A historical claim can be tested. A recollection may be challenged by another witness. A person’s suffering does not vanish because somebody has found a more elegant way to describe it. Doubt is useful precisely because there are differences worth discovering, even when certainty proves harder to obtain than we might wish.
Perhaps the more fruitful habit is to treat certain declarations as beginnings rather than endings. When someone says it is morning, we may ask by which clock, beneath which sky, and according to whose experience. When someone says it is blue, we may ask whether they speak of a visible appearance or a property that remains when visibility is taken away. When we say this is the same ship, we may ask whether sameness resides in its substance, its history, its function or our continuing attachment to its name.
And when we describe another person, or ourselves, with the apparently final authority of is, we might consider what has been removed from the account, what has been added, and who has undertaken the reconstruction. A life may endure through change without being reducible to any single earlier version of itself. A story may preserve something true without preserving every detail. A label may be necessary without ever becoming the whole of the thing it names.
I suspect that is why this old ship continues to interest me. Not because I expect to discover the precise plank upon which identity ceases, but because the question obliges me to look more carefully at the little certainties with which we furnish our world. We may continue calling it the same ship, just as we may continue calling the unseen object blue. We should at least remember the timbers that have been carried away, the new ones quietly fitted in their place, and the darkness through which our confident descriptions sometimes travel.
A note on the sources
The ancient version of the ship appears in Plutarch, Life of Theseus, chapter 23; the later reconstruction problem is discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The account of blue light and reflectance draws upon the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the American Physical Society.
From the writing desk of Tarek von Bergmann.