Truth lights up the soul in proportion to its purity, not in any sense to its quantity. It isn’t the quantity of metal that matters, but the degree of alloy. In this respect, a little pure gold is worth a lot of pure gold. A little pure truth is worth as much as a lot of pure truth.

— Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

“It’s chock full of astonishing claims, some of which I have no idea just what they even mean, I don’t know how to evaluate them. You know, it’s very—this is the first time I taught Simone Weil. That is not easy, especially not for me and my training, which is, like, find the argument and analyze it. Don’t take that approach to her. It does not go well.”

— Jennifer Frey, on Manifesto!

A little pure gold is worth a lot of pure gold? Clearly, this is not a statement about economics. A little pure truth is worth as much as a lot of pure truth? Tell that to Oedipus, who, when the oracle warned him that he would kill his father and marry his mother, might have appreciated knowing that he was adopted.

“Analysing” an argument, in the words of Thomist philosopher Jennifer Frey, involves determining if there are ways the argument could be false. But as Frey herself can see (in what was honestly an excellent podcast episode), a Simone Weil statement of the type I have given above cannot be taken for some sort of strategically defended argument. It’s easy to think of ways in which it is false. The question then becomes, are there meaningful ways in which is is true?

There is an analogy to be made here to poetry. Metaphors are generally false. They derive power from our ability to suspend criticism and instead perceive truth in them. Still, I wouldn’t quite call this particular statement a metaphor. I read Weil as claiming that there is a sense in which it is true, literally.

When might the purity of gold matter more than its quantity? One answer might be, if we want to determine the properties of gold. Determining the density or conductivity or natural colour of gold will require pure gold, in order for the answers to be accurate, but it will not require an especially large amount of gold.

Weil’s statement is made in the context of education. More specifically, she is talking about the ability of the wider public to comprehend, and benefit from, the kinds of truths that are often considered to belong in the realm of higher education. Better, she thinks, to really understand a few theorems in geometry—including their method of proof—than to be given a watered-down set of facts that could be memorised in a quicker time. Better to spend time getting into truly good literature than to speed through easier material that has less depth. Quality over quantity.

As with the statement about gold, there are contexts and purposes for which this simply isn’t true. If you’re learning how to read, you can gain a lot by just reading as much as possible of whatever it is you genuinely like to read. More generally, sometimes we gain more skill by doing a thing carelessly and often than we would by attempting to do it perfectly, less often. Yet, as with gold, purity has its uses. Truth itself has qualitative properties that can change a person.

One of the highest privileges that can be had as a teacher of mathematics is to be present when somebody gets their head around a kind of reasoning that did not previously make sense to them. The simpler the thing you are trying to teach, the harder and more unpredictable it is to convey to someone who doesn’t get it. I had a student, once, who was mystified by the concept of proof by contradiction. We were working on the following proof that the square root of two is irrational:

Suppose the square root of 2 is rational. Then it’s equal to a/b where a and b are natural numbers. Square both sides: 2=a²/b². Now multiply through by the denominator: 2b²=a².

At this point, we use the fact that every natural number has a prime factorization1 that is unique. The number 2b²=a² therefore has a unique factorization into prime numbers. Now, a² must factor into an even number of primes (specifically, two times the number of prime factors of a), and b² must factor into an even number of primes (specifically, two times the number of prime factors of b), meaning that 2b² must factor into an odd number of primes (because we’ve added just one more prime factor when we multiplied by 2). But 2b² and a² are the same number, and the number of primes that this number factorizes into cannot be both even and odd. Since we have deduced a contradiction, our original assumption that the square root of two can be written as a/b must be false.

I walked her through the proof step by step. She could follow the small linkages, but not the over-arching idea. I tried to abstract out the concept of proof by contradiction into its own principle. I diagrammed the proof on a whiteboard with little arrows to try to show the chain of logic. I diagrammed it on a whiteboard again, with more expressive arrows. I smiled outwardly and privately congratulated myself on my patience. I went through the proof “one more time” several times over.

I have no idea what it was that I did, or even if it was anything that I did, beyond being willing to repeat myself in slightly different ways. All I know is, after about half an hour of this, she suddenly said “Oh.” And then, in that half-yearning way that all of us who love the subject know: “Mathematics is actually really cool, isn’t it?”

The class she was taking was an optional general education class, although we always ended up having more mathematics majors taking it than outsiders, because most students try to pick easy courses for gen-ed. This particular young woman was one of the non-majors, which was of course all the more reason for me to spend time helping her out. But she knew, and said, that she’d be leaving the subject behind, and that she might not feel this kind of insight again. Although I tried to tell her that she could always learn more, I also understood perfectly well why she might not.

Particularly with mathematics, one might ask whether it’s even worth getting this far, when there are other students who can see the logic instantly. Those latter students are the ones the harder classes are almost always aimed at. There are plenty of mathematics professors who opine fatalistically that some things just can’t be taught; you either have it or you don’t. But this is only half true. There are indeed things in mathematics that can’t be taught—and yet, somehow, they can be learned.

I almost envied her that moment of insight. It’s been a long time since I could have feelings about a simple proof by contradiction.

Faced with the paradox of how it is that people somehow learn things that can’t be taught, we might entertain the Platonic notion of anamnesis, which holds that there are things that are “learned” by recollecting what the soul knew before we were even born. I’m not convinced we have souls that are separate from our bodies, but there are some kinds of learning that are so mysterious that this model still sounds halfway plausible. Certainly, it’s better than simply diagnosing most students with an incurable variety of ignorance.

Anamnesis features prominently in Plato’s Meno, and mathematical knowledge is Socrates’ central demonstration thereof. Specifically, Socrates uses a series of questions to walk an uneducated slave through a demonstration: if a two-by-two square has area four, how might we create a square of area eight? Coincidentally, the solution to this problem implicitly involves our old friend the square root of two.

I elicited this answer by questions, says Socrates, so how did this uneducated boy know the answers? Since nobody taught him, we can only conclude that he must have known the answers since birth, deep in his soul, and was then reminded of the answer by my questions.

Questioning is a good way to teach mathematics, that much is true. A question can prompt the active exercise of logic instead of allowing a student to slide into passive acceptance and thence into a false sense of understanding that isn’t really there. Yet, I admit, I find Socrates’ explanation of this phenomenon more provocative than convincing. Indeed, the dialogue has Socrates remark, shortly after this explanation, that he does not insist on its being correct in all respects, but only that it gives us a way of seeking.

The main subject of Meno, however, is the question of whether virtue can be taught. Here we might observe an odd parallel. For Socrates notes that virtue does not seem to be teachable by any reliable method. Courting social backlash, he lists a great many disreputable sons of great and virtuous fathers—fathers who would no doubt have taught their sons virtue if it could be done.

But we might ask, even if virtue cannot be taught, can it—like the subtler aspects of mathematics—be learned? Meno ends with the suggestion that virtue is a gift from the gods. To me, this betrays the central quality that Socrates has previously insisted on, when suggesting that such knowledge might be recollected. It risks returning us to a simple “some people have it, some people don’t” model, instead of allowing for the possibility that we might find our way to insight.

Experiences can develop virtue in us. In C. P. Snow’s The Search, moral development arises from falling in love: “Never before had I been engrossed like this in another: but the drive came spontaneously, as though love had released something already waiting in my mind. … [T]he attempt to understand Audrey, which I could not escape, began to give new dimensions to other people: I did not realise it at the time, but by adding one other life to my own, I could not help being touched by many more.” Relatedly, I have heard it said that the birth of a child can elicit this kind of step in the child’s carers, producing a capacity to live for another being, rather than for oneself.

Yet pair-bonding and parenthood can also be selfish. One person’s infatuation may blossom into care, even as another person experiences a mere self-centred wish for intimacy regardless of the true internal world of the desired person. Parenting involves sacrifice, but it can also be a narrowing of horizons; as Ozy notes, it can create a temptation to be less broadly altruistic, in order to give more to your child. It’s not that people can’t learn virtue, but we don’t do it according to any predictable system. We develop consideration for others in fits and starts, in different ways, sometimes by sudden insight and sometimes so slowly as to be almost invisible.

To what extent does knowledge—whether mathematical or moral—depend on the purity, rather than on the amount? The starkness of Weil’s formulation is stimulating precisely because we so often focus on quantitative notions of utility. If we want mathematics for, say, engineering purposes, then many theorems will usually be better than one. Indeed, many engineers use mathematical results without bothering about how they are proven, often to great effect.

On moral questions, too, there exists considerable movement towards quantity of good done, rather than quality of good done. When Effective Altruists focus on material goods such as health, they are in a sense aiming at the philosophically easy parts of a potentially much-more-complex notion of what it means to flourish as a person. Effective Altruists are quite right to note that, if you want to be a better person and you have some spare cash, then there is a lot of low-hanging fruit still to be picked. It would be perverse to say “Giving money to reduce the spread of malaria is too conceptually easy, so even though I could save several lives by doing so, I won’t bother.” But these quantitative concerns are not the whole truth.

To even comprehend Weil’s perspective on the quality of truth, we require an entirely different manner of thinking. Weil asks us to consider what truth does to the human soul, rather than what practical powers the truth might give us. How does it change you, when you have a moment of insight—or when a truth slowly works its way into your being until it becomes a natural part of the way you think?

In an odd way, Weil’s statement strikes me as self-referential. There is a truth she is pointing to, about the qualitative value of comprehending truth as truth, regardless of how many specific theorems you understand or how many books you have read. Though it can only be seen by looking through her words instead of merely taking them at face value, nevertheless there is a pure truth here that has the power to re-orient our priorities.

If we try to speak truth so as to do the most good, quantitatively, then we might alter our writing to fit current fashions, chase subscriber metrics, and attempt to say the simplest possible things that will convince the widest number of people. But if we are trying to speak truth so as to convey the most good, qualitatively, then we will hope to change a few people, maybe even in ways we can’t predict, if the reader obtains a genuine insight from what we’ve written. Those changes, though they will often be less broad, may be more lasting, and more effective, precisely because they have the staying power of pure truth, deeply comprehended.

I think that student of mine who understood proof by contradiction, as a whole, was learning something valuable in itself, regardless of whether she learned any further mathematics and independently of what grade she got or how she compared to any other student. Something important also occurs when we read something that expands our capacity to consider the truth about ourselves, or about others. Nor, indeed, is this kind of truth-related personal development confined to the quasi-academic. There are truths to be found in the intricacies of a craft, in the bodily knowledge needed to perform a physical task, in the patience required for care work.

Holistic truth, to the extent that we can comprehend it, depends on all of these things and more. When we consider that mathematical truths and moral truths might be related, it is not that learning mathematics will, by itself, make you a better person, but rather that we are considering the possibility of a kind of truth that is so broad that it could encompass both, and more beyond. To attempt such understanding, we must seek pure truth wherever it may hide.

C. Thi Nguyen is serious about yo-yo. He has several: a “sweet floaty” round one, an “aggressive hyper-stable” one for difficult tricks, even an old-school “fixie” made of wood. He can tell you all about the types of tricks each one can do, the way they feel on the string, and the state of mind that a difficult trick can induce.

There are yo-yo competitions, but Nguyen is ambivalent about them. Competitions are all about doing visibly difficult tricks. “The demand for public judgment in relatively objective terms drags the entire process away from inner fine-tuning and toward a shared scoring system,” he complains. A system like that doesn’t have room for more subtle artistic creations like those of Tsukasa Takatsu—a “minor saint,” in Nguyen’s words—who devotes himself to inventing elegant “repeaters,” tricks that begin and end at the same point and can be done on infinite loop.

So when are objective scoring systems good, and when are they bad? Nguyen doesn’t have simple answers to that question. After all, scoring systems are a central component of the elaborate European board games that he loves. But on the other hand, scoring systems are also responsible for the way that “student success” in his first job as a philosophy professor was “officially defined as a weighted average of graduation rate and graduation speed.”

This tension between fun targets and dead metrics forms the main alternation of The Score, a delightfully odd book that has a great deal going on beneath the surface. The subtitle is How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game, which makes it sound like corporate self-help that will teach you how to be a better sociopath. In fact, this book is both aesthetic and analytical, combining a beguiling invitation into the beauty of the specific with a careful investigation into how large, impersonal systems can take over our lives even when we don’t mean them to.

This is a vibrantly liberal book that embraces federalism and individual differences and value plurality. Yet it is also a book that places itself against many of the same things that post-liberals rail against when they complain about “liberal modernity.” It has a strong focus on the dangers of managerialism. There’s a whole chapter on how to resist “objectivity laundering.” And it wants us all to think more carefully about what happens when we passively accept the values promoted by technocratic systems.

The book’s central bogeyman is value capture—a phenomenon whereby people can be lulled into thinking that numerical metrics are genuinely measuring what is important or valuable, even when the metric does no such thing. This is a much deeper problem than the mere “perverse incentives” that can arise when metrics force people, at least partly, to optimize the wrong things. You can get “value captured” by a metric even when you’re not being forced. You don’t have to use weight as your sole measure of health; in fact, you probably shouldn’t. You don’t have to judge how good your social media post was by how many likes or shares it got. Yet, people do.

When a metric is reductive or misaligned, people have to make trade-offs between satisfying the metric and satisfying what the metric was actually supposed to measure. When a person is value-captured by a metric, they stop making that trade-off. They lose sight of the deeper and more subtle aims that the metric can’t measure.

This problem sits uneasily with the liberal individualist view that we have to let people “choose their values” without questioning them. A value-captured person is choosing, at least in the sense that they are not being forced. If we want to say that it is bad for people to constantly value crude metrics over more subtle goods, then we have to be prepared to suggest that they have chosen wrongly. This is exactly what Nguyen does suggest!

It’s not that Nguyen wants us all to be the same, mind you. If anything, he’d like us all to become more individual, by way of a deeper examination of what we are doing. A more accurate subtitle might be, Is This The Game You Want To Be Playing?

The Score contains plenty of serious social critique, but mere frustration at the system is not enough to help us build good things. In between its discussions of structural limitations and institutional blind spots, this book considers how more recreational scoring systems can serve as an impetus to develop new skills and make meaningful human connections. The contrast is effective, and not just because it complicates the narrative. When taking on deep, entrenched societal problems, one of the most important motivations we can have is the sense of something wonderful.

Truly, I was unprepared for the sheer joy in this book. Whether he is writing about climbing, or fly fishing, or skateboarding, or yoga, Nguyen has a real gift for conveying what is beautiful and interesting about the things he loves. His descriptions of cooking made me want to rush to the kitchen. Above all else, however, it is the humble subject of games that supplies the book’s most important aesthetic insight.

The nature of a game—whether it’s a board game, a video game, or something more esoteric—is that players step into externally-imposed goals, leading them into new and often uncharacteristic actions. There is a special kind of beauty, here, one that is experienced by inhabiting the game. Nguyen calls this process beauty, because it is beauty inherent in the process of doing something, rather than in an object that we sense from the outside.

Games are a central example of process beauty, but they are not the only example. Why, Nguyen asks, do we not consider process beauty more often in other pursuits? Why do cookbooks always sell themselves on how good the food will be instead of on how much fun you might have making it? Why do we not evaluate a dance on how it must have felt to do it?

I did a lot of social partner dancing as an undergraduate: salsa, swing, some ballroom. I made sure to learn at least a little bit about how to lead, but it was following that really caught me. It had such flow to it, that subtle process of reading signals and acting on them in the moment. I loved it, and I loved getting better at it. Yet, confusingly, I found there was generally a limit to how advanced I wanted my classes to be.

Certainly, competitive ballroom dancing was too scripted. It didn’t help that, the one time I tried it, I was with a partner who was positively gleeful about the discomfort and artificiality of a “proper” basic hold. I dropped it, and him, like a hot potato. Even with a social dance like salsa, as soon as the lessons I was taking stopped being about generic “salsa” and started being about conforming to a particular style—usually the sharp flair and strong lines of LA salsa—I started to enjoy it less. Something about it just wasn’t quite what I wanted.

Then one time, in the social dance space after a lesson, a guy asked me, almost apologetically, if he could lead me through some Cuban salsa. All I knew about Cuban salsa was that it was less “linear” (like LA salsa) and more “circular.” But I can follow! I told him yes.

It was a revelation. The sheer momentum of it! No posing, no pausing. Every touch-communicated cue felt like a soft alteration in a movement I had already been making. I’ve danced with plenty of good leaders. I had never felt this.

In hindsight, I should have tried to learn more. At the time, I wasn’t sure if what I had liked about Cuban salsa would be robust. Getting too advanced in any other kind of dance had always made it less fun. Why should this style be any different?

What was it that I even liked about it, anyway?

As a dancer, I was happiest when responding in the moment with motion that felt natural, even if a lot of learning had gone into it. I hadn’t liked more “advanced” dancing when it was asking me to sacrifice the experiential in favour of optimizing how cool I might look to an observer. But it was never about wanting to be sloppy, or less skilled. There was an exacting, excellent beauty that I had wanted to improve, in my dancing, all along. Process beauty. Maybe if I’d known what to call it, I’d have looked more confidently at Cuban salsa, knowing how to judge if I wanted to learn more of it or not.

This book has made me consciously aware of a kind of beauty that I’ve always known but couldn’t always see how to aim for.

When this book leaves the personal and turns to the political, it continues to be reflective and insightful. One response to the disadvantages of metrics is to anathematise all calculation as a cold farce that is unworthy of the complexity of humanity. Another is to become locked into the technocratic search for a better system. Nguyen’s view is more nuanced. The disadvantages of metrics will not always be able to be solved by a better metric. On the other hand, we wouldn’t use metrics if we weren’t getting something from them.

One of the first advantages of metrics that Nguyen points out is transparency. We want to be able to check that people are doing their jobs. One way to do this is to publish numbers that measure something about their competence or efficiency. On the other hand, this can undercut expertise. An expert in a particular subject often has a much more nuanced sense of what is important about it, in a way that could never be boiled down to a few numbers. Holding everyone to publicly available metrics can make it harder for a practitioner to bring that expertise to bear. But of course, in order to allow people to avoid this problem we have to trust those experts.

Who is an expert, anyway? If we’re talking about people whose more-detailed knowledge can get over-written by a crude metric then the category is broader than you think, says Nguyen.

I don’t just mean formal expertise, like having a medical degree or a scientific PhD. We are all experts in the particular terrain of our lives: our jobs, our family, our local community, our weird hobbies. …

Collectively, as a public, we’re inexpert about everything. And public transparency metrics puts us—the collective inexpert public—in charge.

Placing local knowledge and domain expertise into the same category is an artful move. So often, in public policy debates, these two types of expertise are played off against each other, with one group playing the role of the cold, meaningless metric—global elite control or ignorant public pressure—and the other group vainly trying to bring the nuanced understanding, whether professional or local. With a single twist, we suddenly see that the professionals and the public are, in a sense, facing the same problem.

Some of my professional knowledge is about metrics. I’m a data scientist at a large public research organisation in my home country of New Zealand, with a focus on environmental science and disaster mitigation. There are a lot of new and powerful data science techniques, these days. Unfortunately, spending even a small amount of time exploring a new research direction requires me to get permission by way of two or possibly three layers of management.

In discussing that problem with said third level of management, recently, I found myself drawing on this book. “I get that you’re under pressure to show that you’re responsive to government priorities,” I said, “and that you want us to be guided by that central sense of direction. But I think you also want us to be guided by the field itself, by the expert knowledge that can perceive science opportunities as they arise. You want both, right?”

I got immediate agreement: “Yes, we want both.”

Did I instantly succeed in making any changes to the system as a whole? Alas, no. Was this an effective way to get an ear for my own desired research direction? Yes, actually.

As a colleague who overheard our conversation put it: “Well, that was interesting.”

This book does not want you to live your life solely or even mostly in pursuit of professional success. But it does think large systems are here to stay, and it treats the problems arising from centralised control as a fact of life, with which its finer concerns must often engage. I said it wasn’t corporate self-help, and I stand by that. However, if you picked it up because you wanted it to be corporate self-help, you probably wouldn’t be disappointed.

You also might get more than you bargained for. I laughed, at first, when I got to the end:

It’s Choose Your Own Adventure time. Pick one ending and tear out the other one, unread. Read both and let them bang around in your head for a little while. Or read them, then cut and paste the bits you like and add some more. Write yourself a better ending. Or stop right here, stand up, say, “Fuck you, you dumb-ass philosopher,” and go play some games instead.

When I was done laughing, I read both endings, and let them bang around in my head for a little while. And now, in my head, I am tearing up the entire preceding book, cutting and pasting it into a whole different story. This book is serious about play. It’s not trying to hide that. But I didn’t fully have a read on how serious it was, until I got to the end.

There is something very powerful about being willing to be silly. You can read Nguyen in tragic style as the carelessly frivolous philosopher of games, turning to children’s toys because we’ve forgotten how to be meaningful with anything else. But with all his cheeky games, Nguyen has a deep sense of the fine grain. He encourages his readers to play with the rules, putting them on and taking them off, seeing how they shape you and thinking about who you want to be. How do you work elegantly within the rules of any given game? Does the game work better when you add a new constraint? Or remove one?

I know the move that I would make, from here. We are all, always, constrained by the whole world. How do you work elegantly with that? If you think this sounds like a fairly innocuous line of thought, well, so did I, once upon a time.

The Score does not make this move, at least not on the surface. Instead, it sends us all out, anarchically, to explore our own weird little details of the world. “I am, to be honest, very good at games of deception and manipulation,” Nguyen tells us, describing his taste in board games.

What game is he playing, with this book?

Many thanks to for helping me edit this piece! Any remaining awkward turns of phrase are my own fault.

It’s a shocking thing for me to confess, but here goes. My husband and I buy feijoas. Last year, we were getting them regularly from the supermarket when they were in season. Upwards of $7 a kilo, too. Yeah, I know.

You’re not supposed to buy feijoas. You’re supposed to get them from a neighbour, if you don’t have a tree of your own. Someone will know someone who has too many feijoas, it being the nature of fruit trees to be maddeningly profuse, and in a few days, after the right requests have been passed back and forth along the right channels, you’ll find yourself with a couple of large plastic bags of fat, finger-length, green ellipsoid mysteries.

This is where the fun really starts. Commercially grown fruits select for reliable strains, because people want to know what they are buying. A tree that may have been in someone’s back yard for decades is less obliging. Little child fingers, businesslike Mum fingers, and large hairy Dad fingers go questing into the bag, squeezing gently. The rock-like ones will need a few more days. The really soft ones are probably bruised. The rest exist within a spectrum of fleshy to jelly-like that is almost impossible to figure out without cutting into the fruit.

The fleshy part of the feijoa is grainy but full of sharp flavour. The jelly is sweet and smooth. The perfect balance between the two is somehow both smooth and flavourful, and all the more precious because you never know when or if you’ll find another one that tastes quite like it. If you’re feeling sociable, you might pass the other half to someone else to prove how good this one was. If you’re not feeling sociable, you’ll hoard it for yourself, one more bite before it’s gone of the perfect feijoa that you may never see again.

In flavour and indeed in variability, commercial feijoas are not that different to gifted ones. But it’s the principle of the thing. You’re not supposed to buy feijoas. Most supermarkets don’t even stock them. Ours does. Here in the central city, back yards are scarce, and people still want feijoas. The market is stepping in where the gift economy fails.

Back yard fruit was a recurring feature of my childhood. Prior to adulthood I had never even considered that supermarkets might stock lemons. Lemons come from your tree, in your yard. That is where lemons come from. Of course, there were evidently some people out there without trees, who were in need of lemons, but I mostly understood this in the context of the people who took our excess lemons from the box outside our front gate. It must be very tricky for them when they couldn’t find lemons from us, I thought, naively. Perhaps they had to find substitutes, in recipes?

My parents had very different attitudes towards the fruit from other people’s trees. My mother would frown and fidget when she saw plums or pears that had dropped over somebody’s fence and were rotting on the pavement. “I wonder if they would let me pick them up and make jam out of them or something,” she would muse. My mother was parsimonious to the point of re-using tea bags, and the waste bothered her.

My father, by contrast, would have been mortified by the suggestion of going up to someone else and asking for their excess, even if they evidently weren’t using it. To some extent, I think this difference is one of class: my mother grew up poor, and my father did not. But I think, also, this might be a reflection of where they each grew up. Both of my parents are New Zealanders, but my father’s father was a telephone engineer who worked for the United Nations. My father spent most of his childhood overseas. My mother, by contrast, had never even been out of New Zealand until she was, I think, thirty-four? Some such late age, at any rate.

Some back yard fruit is uncontested public property. In Christchurch, vast areas of the city where people used to live have been declared uninhabitable due to the damage from the February 2011 earthquake. Fruit trees still grow in the gardens of those abandoned houses, and foraging from them has become a popular activity. The Christchurch City Council has expanded on this, and its website now lists public places where fruit is free to take.

McKendry Park in Blenheim does a similar thing, in the form of a public plum orchard. Trees have been planted with a wide variety of plum variants. At the right time of year, you can visit the park and wander from tree to tree, sampling from each and comparing flavours.

Fruit from public land is lovely, of course, but it’s not the same as the gift economy exemplified by feijoas. Gift economies necessitate community in a unique way. Sometimes they even develop reciprocality, like when my mother used to send excess plum jam (made from our tree, of course) to our neighbours that we knew, down the street, and they would respond with baked goods in a week or two.

Store-bought feijoas make up for a gap in the gift economy. They also put that gift economy at risk. A relationship-based transaction is replaced with an impersonal exchange of money for goods. An impetus to make connections with other people is lost.

The apartment building in which I live likes to foster community. We have social events, a couple of times a year. We say hello to each other in the stairwell. Beside the front door there’s a table where we leave things for other people to take. Nobody is growing so much fruit that they have excess, of course, not with our tiny potted plants or even with the veggie box that one of my neighbours has on the roof. But people leave books, and magazines, and occasionally excess electronics.

This year, it would appear that somebody knows somebody. As I went to step out the door, this morning, I saw a paper bag full of fruit. Stapled to it was a note. “It’s feijoa time,” it said. “Enjoy!”

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Right-thinking readers will be relieved to learn that, in the years since publishing this piece, we’ve found some more respectable sources of feijoas. The fruit-and-vegetable seller at our nearest farmers’ market sells feijoas when they are in season, and indeed occasionally has other products sourced from somebody’s backyard. He and my husband know each other pretty well, by now, so buying feijoas from him isn’t so bad.

Of course, now that I’ve become religious I also get feijoas from my Quaker meeting. In fact, I would probably get them from my Quaker meeting more often, were it not that there are so many people there with feijoa trees that some of us are rather tired of having to help eat the fruits, leading to a sense that perhaps people shouldn’t bring them in. This leads to a slightly stealthier gift economy of feijoa products, such as chutney. Last Sunday, it was feijoa cake.

So I thank for her recent post that frames longer writing on Substack as a sensible endeavour. Whilst I also appreciate ’s principled defence of the small magazine, for me it is often Substack that gives me a space to aim for the best version of what I want to write. If you’ve stumbled on this piece, I hope you find it worth your time. If you’re a subscriber, thanks for being here.

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I. The Purpose of Women

In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan described a silent problem that would go on to inspire much of the second-wave feminist movement:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—"Is this all?”

A striking fact about this restless yearning is how clearly it evokes a crisis of meaning. What am I doing with my life? Is this all? What is my purpose?

Such questions are traditionally the province of religion. Indeed, the modern crisis of meaning is frequently seen as a golden opportunity to argue for the continued relevance of religion to modern life. When responding to this problem, we might expect that religious thinkers would have been in their element. So why is it that we seem to have addressed this crisis of meaning in secular terms rather than religious ones?

The failure of traditional religion to adequately address these questions of meaning is potentially embarrassing, even shocking. Yes, it is difficult to address a pluralist society on a contentious question if the argument is made from an overtly religious perspective, but questions of meaning in life are also quite difficult to address from a secular perspective; both approaches have handicaps. We will see, as this piece progresses, that secular feminism can sometimes struggle to ground itself in an appropriately rich understanding of what human beings should aim for. We will also see that religious explanations of womanhood can at times be inclined to leave all the philosophical advantages of religion lying dusty and unused on the shelf.

When I examine the impact of the complementary difficulties faced by religious and secular perspectives on modern feminism, I observe a specifically feminist variant on what , in the most recent issue of The Point, describes as an issue affecting the left more generally. Left-wing movements are focused on justice and equality, and, he claims, “the achievement of justice can only ever be a negative or corrective ambition as opposed to a positive or creative one. Just as peace is the name we give to the absence of war, so justice is the name we give to the absence of injustice.” The lack of a positive vision, he suggests, is almost built in.

Thakkar is not entirely correct, in my view, because I think that successful equality fights usually only happen when there is a strong argument that the thing to be distributed equally is a genuine moral good. This is true of class issues like workplace safety and wages you can actually live on. It is true of civil rights such as voting and participation in an integrated society. Gay and trans activist movements are intertwined with sexuality and self-expression, both of which are powerful creative drives, and the gay marriage fight drew considerable advantage from being about love. As for feminism, it argues for women’s humanity—a complex notion, to be sure, but one that can and should be aligned with a moral vision for what humans ought to be.

Where I agree with Thakkar is that, over the past ten years or so, that positive vision has largely been absent, and the result has been some decidedly uninspiring politics. Feminism, in particular, is struggling at the moment. In July of last year, wrote a widely-shared piece entitled The Great Feminist Exhaustion. recently declared in The Atlantic that millennial feminism is dead. Both of these authors identify as feminists, to be clear; they are not writing wishfully. Nevertheless, they perceive that feminism does not seem to be going anywhere, at present.

Within the subject of how to seek left-wing positive visions, I think it is important to examine the relationship between religion and feminism in particular. There are many aspects of the second-wave interactions between feminists and traditional religious authorities that could do with careful examination, because these have helped to form the secular feminism that we have, today. In order to understand why secular feminism shapes its understanding(s) of meaning and purpose in the way that it does, we need to understand what it was growing from and reacting to.

Moreover, religious viewpoints can have something useful to say about purpose and meaning, even to those without religion. Because they are often rich in detail, they can provide an interesting contrast to sparser secular viewpoints, and at times can be a source of inspiration for ways to make secular viewpoints more substantive.

Finally, religion has been and indeed still is a potent source of anti-feminist viewpoints, and I am a strong proponent of co-opting your enemy’s advantages, where possible. In the course of this piece, I will argue that men who are seeking detailed patterns to follow in life are more likely than women to find that traditional religion can easily satisfy this need. It is important to understand and sympathise with the helpful frameworks that some of these men are getting from religion; it is equally important to help such men understand that many women are not going to find themselves in quite the same position.

Let me start, therefore, by addressing the question of whether, or when, religion has the power to address our desire for meaning in the first place.

II. Against Mutilation

Is religion a way of becoming more human, more vibrant, more alive? Or does religion set restrictions that prevent us from growing into well-rounded human beings, repressing our natural desires and pacifying us with false promises?

A strong reason not to be religious could be that it forecloses certain options by which we might seek happiness and fulfilment. This is particularly striking when we consider, for example, religious viewpoints that deny people the opportunity to make same-sex romantic or sexual pairings. The human capacity to pair-bond is a rich source of connection and meaning. Can it be right to deny it to people?

We might think that this is a special case, and that we can solve it simply by taking a religious viewpoint that allows same-sex marriage! But this is actually just one source of apparently useless denial. Religious asceticism can include not just celibacy or solitude, but also denial of comforts such as food or shelter, and restrictive vows of silence, and even various kinds of deliberately inflicted pain. To say nothing of religious restrictions on the mind! Religious restrictions on free intellectual exploration often horrify me; I am not alone in this.

A central charge that I might make against conservative religion is this: we know that traditional formulations can inflict pain and deny worthwhile endeavours. How can it be right to be satisfied with a social structure that simply accepts this?

One of the most thought-provoking responses that I’ve seen to this charge comes from the philosopher Charles Taylor, in Chapter 17 of his most well-known book, A Secular Age1. Taylor is Catholic, and he often defends religion on humanist grounds, but in this chapter he does not dismiss the accusation that religion can diminish our capacity for fulfilment and happiness. Yes, he says, too strong a focus on the ascetic can mutilate the human spirit, if unwisely applied. Yes, it is deeply wrong to be cavalier about such mutilation on grounds that the rules say so and everything will be all right once you get to heaven. It is also wrong for conservative religions to try to defend themselves with the claim that their harshest restrictions are in fact not that hard. Religion with high standards for human behaviour has a dilemma: shrug at the mutilation caused by applying harsh restrictions, or bowdlerise human nature by suggesting that the restrictions aren’t really difficult.

Yet, says Taylor, every society must have some restrictions. So, can secular humanists really be so sure that this dilemma won’t arise for them, too? What about people who find meaning in life from trying to dominate others, and who feel stifled in contexts that are too egalitarian? What about the human capacity for (and sometimes fascination with) violence?

We might also consider, in this context, the attractions of the Romantics’ radical freedom. As wrote last year in , “Romanticism is genius plus criminality in an attempt to make the outer world resemble the inner world — beautiful, wild, insane, primitive and unconscious, and yet highly refined at the same time. Maybe for good reason, Romanticism has not proven to be sound or adaptive. It’s been weeded out of civilization.” Yet the notion still holds an undeniable allure, because “being a Romantic means, perhaps, that you’ve felt a transformative love — a love worth dying for. … Romanticism exalts feeling; feeling deepens life.”

A secular humanist, when faced with claims such as these, might be tempted towards two potential reactions. We might claim that violence, and reckless feeling, and so on, are impulses that simply need to be weeded out, in order to make a more rational and orderly society. This, Taylor would claim, risks the same charge of mutilation that we might level at a conservative religion that shrugs at the possibility of stifling important aspects of the human personality. Countervailingly, we might claim that there is no true deep human need, in most people, for anything really impermissible. This, Taylor would say, is bowdlerisation. Human beings have so much more capacity for darkness than that!

When I first read this, I was tempted to respond with a plea to allow us to at least make the best attempt we can. Even if I don’t have a full solution to offer you, even if human society will always contain elements of the tragic, still, why not try for the utmost we can do to help people live happy and fulfilled lives? But Taylor has outflanked me, by holding not merely a willingness to look but an outright faith that a solution exists! There is a difference, he suggests, between cutting off a problematic desire and transforming it into something better. The possibility of healthy, fulfilled spiritual growth adds a new dimension to the problem. To be sure, this potential solution cannot simply be produced on demand; nor should we expect it ever to fully materialise in this life. But it gives us a target to aim for that does not require that we simply accept mutilation. It allows Taylor to formulate his “maximal demand.” How, he asks, can we “define our highest spiritual or moral aspirations for human beings, while showing a path to the transformation involved that doesn’t crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity?”

This is certainly bold. Nor is it an unqualified defence of Christianity; Taylor freely concedes that his viewpoint implies that “there are clearly wrong versions of Christian faith.” But the right version—even if we only suppose its existence by faith—would not mutilate us.

The framework Taylor has introduced here would not necessarily be accepted by all Christians, but it is useful for articulating broad connections. For example, as an agnostic, I can use Taylor’s faith in a solution to his “maximal demand” as one end of a bridge between a religious way of seeking a fulfilment that is open to all and a secular humanist way of hoping for a fulfilment that is open to all, even if secular humanists cannot declare faith in the existence of a full solution to this demand.

III. Gender and Human Nature

Taylor’s framework can also illuminate two oppositely-gendered centres of political feeling. When Taylor aims straight at the drive for violence as a particularly difficult one to safely satisfy, he is giving the problem of passion a notable masculine edge. In gesturing towards the kind of religious aspiration that could transform such feelings into something worthwhile and constructive, Taylor prefigures some of the movements that we now see amongst young men, whether it be Jordan Petersen’s myth-making and defense of hierarchy, the Catholic conversions of figures like JD Vance, or the Trump-supporting “sensitive young men” described by in her article in the February 2025 issue of The Point. If the men in these movements are animated by a desire for a transcendent kind of fulfilment, then it makes perfect sense that neo-Nietzschean thinkers like Bronze Age Pervert would find themselves alongside traditionalist Catholic converts, notwithstanding the substantial ideological differences that exist between the two.

Taylor does not provide a comparable illumination of the specifically feminine psyche, but there are clear feminist readings of the issues he outlines. When people use a placidly submissive description of feminine nature to say that women lack the kind of inconvenient passionate drives that cannot simply be wished away, they are bowdlerising in Taylor’s sense of the word. Moreover, when people respond to women who do not fit into these narrow, bowdlerised depictions of women by saying that such women simply need to cut off the parts of themselves that don’t fit, this is a clear case of what Taylor calls mutilation.

Consider, for example, Pope Pius XII’s 1945 address on Women’s Duties in Social and Political Life. The address begins promisingly, noting that men and women are “equal … in regard to the supreme end of human life, which is everlasting union with God in the happiness of Heaven.” Read narrowly, this could be a statement about what happens after you die, with little relevance to life on Earth. Read more broadly, it could be an affirmation that women, like men, should rightly feel a kind of aspiration that goes beyond any single Earthly goal. But sadly, this early potential acknowledgement of a transcendent purpose for women is quickly eclipsed by a different explanation of women’s spiritual nature:

Now a woman’s function, a woman’s way, a woman’s natural bent, is motherhood. Every woman is called to be a mother, mother in the physical sense, or mother in a sense more spiritual and more exalted, yet real none the less. 

To this end the Creator has fashioned the whole of woman’s nature: not only her organism, but also and still more her spirit, and most of all her exquisite sensibility.

Notwithstanding his earlier statement that the supreme end, for humanity, is union with God, Pius XII nevertheless claims that the whole of woman’s nature, including her spiritual nature, is fashioned toward a different end, namely, that of motherhood.

It is not hard to see how this unfortunate contradiction might impede the ability of the church to speak to the condition of the disillusioned housewife described by Betty Friedan. After all, if motherhood is the true end towards which the Creator has fashioned women, then it surely cannot be possible for a good woman to be unfulfilled, if she is a mother. Within this bowdlerised view of women, a mother is achieving her one true purpose already. What more could she possibly want?

Fiction of the time can give us a more detailed picture of how confining Christian viewpoints in the mid-twentieth century could be, when describing feminine nature. In That Hideous Strength, a 1945 novel by C. S. Lewis, we are introduced to Jane Studdock, a lonely newlywed whose husband is often absent, and who is attempting to complete a doctoral degree in poetry. The turning point in her character arc comes in the form of a direct spiritual experience:

The name me was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded. It was a person (not the person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of.

You might be thinking that this view of Jane as a “thing” sounds bad, but surely this isn’t actually a reference to sexual objectification. Alas, it is. Just a few paragraphs earlier, we have been considering Jane’s “haunting female fear of being treated as a thing, an object of barter and desire and possession.” The implication appears to be that a woman can accept sexual objectification, once she accepts that she was created by God to be an object in the first place.

Jane’s broader arc is one in which both her academic interest in poetry and her desire for a more authentic connection with her husband are doomed to be, per the text, rightfully unsatisfied. The text emphasises that Jane’s academic interests are part of an unnecessary desire to be taken seriously. Moreover, in anticipation of her turn to Christianity, Jane comes to understand that it is fine if her husband ”sometimes apparently prefer[s] her person to her conversation and sometimes his own thoughts to both. Why should anyone be particularly interested in what she said?”

Both poetry and the desire to be heard in a loving relationship can be important elements of a person’s spirituality. When these aspects of Jane’s character are summarily cut off, instead of being transformed into something better, the resulting mutilation is already dehumanising. It is, unfortunately, entirely in keeping with this context that her conversion to Christianity should involve coming to see herself as partly an object.

Oddly enough, this objectified view of women occurs alongside a parallel plot that is viciously satirical about a kind of secular modern corporate administration that views the people under its power as rubes to be manipulated and resources to be optimised. That Hideous Strength is, in many ways, a fictional fleshing-out of ideas that Lewis had previously developed in The Abolition of Man, where he warns that, without a strong understanding of human nature, men will be vulnerable to exploitation by forces who believe they can shape men to their convenience. “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.”

In That Hideous Strength we see that this very same author who objects to an instrumental view of man is quite willing to suggest that God has an instrumental view of woman. The notion of human nature is employed here to make a woman see herself instrumentally. After all, “a thing made to please” is her nature. It would be wrong not to conform to it. We have here a concerning loophole in the idea that robust notions of human nature will prevent us from exploiting each other. In fact, the concept of human nature can be used just as easily to mandate exploitation as to prevent it.

IV. The Need for Transcendence

Against this background, it is not surprising that the relationship between religion and second-wave feminism would be fraught, and significant points of difference would arise with religious viewpoints that give strongly gendered explanations of human nature. Indeed, feminism is frequently social-constructivist about human nature in general. That something always has been done in a particular way need not mean that it always should be done that way. A woman’s place need not always be in the home, for example, even if many societies place her there.

However, a feminism that tries to be completely social-constructivist about human nature will run into a problem. Namely, if there is no factual, fixed human nature, and a person can become whatever society trains them to be, then we should be able to train women to be happy housewives who do not need further goals beyond that. Moreover, if there is no normative human nature—no restrictions on how a human being ought to be shaped, in defiance of any society that states otherwise—then what moral objection to this could we possibly have?

Simone de Beauvoir averts this problem very early on in The Second Sex, with the following statement of her underlying morality:

Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing towards other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion towards an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is a degradation of existence into ‘in-itself’, of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fall if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil.

As we might expect from an atheist existentialist, Beauvoir’s concept of human purpose is open-ended and self-driven. We must keep striving for new things, instead of merely existing placidly. Although this allows for freedom as to which things we should keep striving for, note that this viewpoint is strongly normative. In Beauvoir’s philosophy it is actively wrong to cease reaching for the transcendent and be contented with the purely mundane—or indeed to try to force anyone else to do this.

In The Human-Not-Quite-Human, the Christian feminist Dorothy L. Sayers uses a more traditional Christian notion of human nature, albeit with the proviso that the church needs to recognise that women are human beings just as men are; more like the “neighbouring sex,” she suggests, than the “opposite sex.” Sayers gives a historical explanation as to why women might no longer be content to remain in the home. Industry, she points out, has removed many productive tasks out of homes and into factories. Woman’s place “in the home” is not a fixed state because the home itself has changed. “It is perfectly idiotic to take away women’s traditional occupations and then complain because she looks for new ones. Every woman is a human being—one cannot repeat that too often—and a human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.”

As a Christian, Sayers also defends women’s access to the transcendent—although, of course, Christians and atheist existentialists do not conceive of the transcendent in precisely the same way. Still, in her resonant admiration for Mary the sister of Martha, who left her household tasks undone to sit at the feet of Jesus, Sayers is clearly pointing towards the moral importance of transcendent purpose in the lives of women. And Sayers is firm in her rebuke of contemporary religious structures that have failed to adequately give room to this impulse in women.

Sayers and Beauvoir were writing in 1941 and 1949, respectively. Both pre-date second-wave feminism somewhat, even as they prefigure its concerns, and indeed neither one identifies as feminist in the works I have quoted! Each holds, in her own way, the opinion that women need purposes beyond motherhood, as an expression of their human nature. Each is speaking against an opposition that is at least partially located in the church (though it also arises in simple popular prejudice). Sayers finds her solution within Christianity; Beauvoir looks outside it.

V. The Directing Influence of Religion

At the start of this essay, I said that we seem to have addressed the crisis of meaning articulated by Betty Friedan in secular terms rather than religious ones. But is that historically true, when we consider the women’s movements of the mid-twentieth century? The story of religion and second-wave feminism is frequently told as one of the latter attempting to influence the former, in which feminism arises of itself and then attempts to re-model religion into a more feminist form. Yet even in histories that use this framing, we see indications of the reverse influence. For example, in her chapter of the anthology Transforming the Faith of our Fathers, Charlotte Bunch recalls:

In 1962, when I left home bound for college … I was restless and searching for something that I did not know how to name. It was through the student Christian movement in the 1960s—the YWCA and the Methodist Student Movement in particular—that I was able to transform my vague ideals into a life as a political activist.

In the Methodist Student Movement, Bunch found a mixed-sex community in which female leadership was normal and encouraged. She contrasts this with the broader Protestant community, in which leadership tended to be male, and with secular activist groups, where she “felt patronized by the men of the left, both as a woman and as a Christian.”

So one answer to the question “Why didn’t second-wave feminist women turn to religion as a resource for finding broader meaning in life?” is that they did. Notably, amongst church groups that were already fighting for racial justice as part of the civil rights movement, there was a pre-existing commitment to equality and human rights that women could call upon to justify their participation in civil rights activism. This sometimes included activism for women’s rights. One prominent example of this was Church Women United (CWU), which was founded in 1941 and became a department of the National Council of Churches (NCC) in 1950. Susan Hartmann writes in The Other Feminists that:

From its inception, CWU leaders chafed at the disparity between women’s vast contributions to church work and their near absence in decision making. … In 1959 [CWU] took steps to facilitate women’s employment outside the home by issuing a study and discussion guide on the issue for church groups. Although the organization had supported the principle of equal pay for women since 1950, its members could not testify before Congress on behalf of federal legislation until CWU’s parent body, the NCC, approved. Not until the eleventh hour did CWU obtain that approval, when the general board of the council adopted a resolution in support of equal pay legislation in February 1963.

Depending on the denomination or indeed simply on the individuals involved, when it came to women seeking a broader purpose in life, churches could be a motivational source of values, a potent resource for networking and personal development, or a negational authority attempting to block the path. Sometimes, the same church could be all three. In a 2010 article in Dialogue, the Mormon feminist historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich recalls poignantly that Sonia Johnson, who was excommunicated for her criticism of the Mormon church’s opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, was “a feisty Mormon with speaking and organizational skills nourished through long Church service. Because she … believed in personal revelation, she wasn’t afraid to stand up to power. Sadly, the community that nourished her also dismissed her.”

VI. The Curious Case of Communist Feminism

Religion, however, was not the only kind of broader worldview that feminism could be embedded into. No history of second-wave feminism would be complete without considering the Redstockings, a group of New York Communist radical women who had a profound influence on the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Their membership included Kate Millett, whose book Sexual Politics introduced the term “patriarchy” into wider discourse, Patricia Mainardi, whose 1970 essay “The Politics of Housework” prefigured many a relationship dispute, and Shulamith Firestone, who advocated for advanced reproductive technologies that would liberate women from childbirth. The Redstockings also pioneered an activist technique of consciousness-raising, in which women held group discussions to examine their lives and compare their experiences of sexism. This practice spread far beyond its Communist roots, with consciousness-raising groups established in professional networks, in religious organisations, amongst more liberal activists and beyond.

Notwithstanding existing Communist support for women’s rights in theory, the Redstockings certainly encountered pushback from their male comrades. Unlike their counterparts in traditional religious organisations, however, the Redstockings had no need to ask permission. Confronted with the accusation that they were simply addressing their personal issues instead of doing radical activism that would be relevant to the cause, the Redstockings shot back that what they were doing was radical, in the etymological sense: they were getting at the root of the problem. Besides, as Carol Hanisch explained in a classic essay, “One of the first things we discover in [consciousness-raising] groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time.” That is, the personal is political—another deeply influential second-wave feminist idea.

Why were Communists so central to second-wave feminism? I don’t think that Communism per se was an essential component; certainly, the Redstockings’ ideas were adopted by many people who didn’t share their Marxist commitments. Rather, it seems to me that Communism, for feminist purposes, had all the advantages of a religion with none of the downsides. It had a theory of human nature and personal fulfilment. It had networks. It had activist techniques. And it had no authority to shut feminism down, when it sprang up.

However, the Redstockings were of course not the only Marxist feminists. If we want to understand the success of this specific group of Communist radical feminists, then consciousness-raising is the single most important factor. Why? Well, if the aim was to understand what women are, and how women should live, and if traditional formulations were failing to meaningfully address this question, then talking to women was an effective place to start! By taking the immediate personal experience of women’s lives as their starting point, the Redstockings found themselves well positioned to address real issues that mattered to women more broadly. Their social empiricism was able to outgrow their ideological starting point.

VII. Losing Our Grounding

Human nature is a hard problem, and pinning it down precisely is very difficult. One strength of liberalism lies the way that freedom can give people room to express their nature without being confined to something overly narrow. But, for feminists, having no theory of human nature at all is a deep weakness. Even a flawed theory—provided that the theory in question allows women sufficient room to seek meaningful lives—is better than allowing the subject to lapse entirely. Unless we have a sense of what people are, and why that matters, the “radical notion that women are people” will collapse at its foundation.

If we examine modern feminist arguments, we see many signs of weakness that arise from a reluctance to take on the harder, deeper problems of human nature and purpose. On feminist blogs in the 2000s, a commonly-repudiated notion was that of “choice feminism”—the idea that anything a woman does can be feminist, if only she chooses it freely. This would give rise to lengthy battles about which acts are “feminist” or not. Which kinds of sexuality are empowering, and which are degrading? Is it feminist to be a stay-at-home mother? Are you a bad feminist if you shave your legs?

This kind of discourse became so ubiquitous that Roxane Gay used Bad Feminist as the title of her 2014 essay collection. As the 2010s continued, and feminism went mainstream, it became more and more convenient to drop such wrangling in favour of a general permissiveness and a sense that women should simply be empowered in their choices. Sophia Amoruso, founder of the online fashion retailer ‘Nasty Gal,’ published a memoir in 2014 titled #GIRLBOSS, and the term became synonymous with a type of capitalist feminism focused on material success.

In her 2017 book Why I Am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, criticises these developments, writing:

Much of contemporary feminism uses the language of power. Girls need to be “empowered,” women need to fight for “self-empowerment,” “girl power,” etc. There is little conversation about what that power is to be used for, because that is supposed to be obvious: whatever the girl wants.

But growing up in a system that measures success by money, that values consumerism and competition, that devalues compassion and community, these girls and women have already been indoctrinated into what to want. Without close examination, without conversion into a different way of thinking and acting, what that girl wants is going to be money, power, and, possibly, her continued subjugation, because a feminism that does not provide an alternative to the system will still have the system’s values.

Crispin frequently calls out modern feminism’s “shift of focus from society to the individual.” What she does not explicitly note is that these associated problems align closely with common critiques of liberalism. Instead of assigning a fixed human purpose, liberalism leaves people free to make choices. This could be a good thing, if people are better at finding good purposes on their own than they would be if they were more constrained. But if “making free choices” ceases to be a means to achieve good ends and becomes the sole societally acknowledged end goal, the result can be an empty liberalism not unlike “choice feminism.” Likewise, when the people inside a liberal system cease to supply it with alternative values, the values of the market can take over—not unlike “girlboss feminism.”

Crispin’s solution is to supply those missing values. “We must stop telling each other stories that equate money with value,” she writes. “We must imagine a world where value is expressed with things like love and care. … We do not have to reward exploitation, we do not have to support the degradation of our planet, of our souls, of our bodies. We can resist. We must stop thinking so small.”

Jessa Crispin has the right idea—with one caveat. Her declaration of values is presented as if it were a subset of feminism, a manifesto for feminists to sign on to. However, many of her principles are not, in themselves, feminist in nature. They seem more like a superset than a subset. Rather than saying that feminism ought to have broad values inside it, I think it makes more sense to say that feminism needs to be rooted in a broader worldview, outside it.

Indeed, in a liberal society, different views on feminine (and thus human) nature and purpose can give rise to different feminisms. We should welcome the resulting debate! Setting aside the narrow question of transgender issues, modern feminism sometimes seems depressingly unified in the worst way possible: not because there is agreement on these deeper questions but because we are increasingly silent on the subject. We can still address material concerns; #MeToo could be strong in part because physical safety is easily comprehensible, for example. But modern liberal feminism is increasingly silent about the role of purpose, of transcendence, of ultimate goals and of meaning in life.

VIII. Finding Our Grounding

Now is not a good time for feminists to be muted on the topic of deeper meaning. Recent reporting suggests that we are seeing some increased influence of religious feeling, particularly amongst young men. Sociologist reported in 2023 that amongst Generation Z, the traditional tendency for women to be more religious than men has ceased to hold. In the New York Times, Ruth Graham reports on churches who are noticing the change:

Grace Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, has not made a conscious effort to attract young men. It is an unremarkable size, and is in many ways an ordinary evangelical church. Yet its leaders have noticed for several years now that young men outnumber young women in their pews. When the church opened a small outpost in the nearby town of Robinson last year, 12 of the 16 young people regularly attending were men.

“We’ve been talking about it from the beginning,” said Phil Barnes, a pastor at that congregation, Hope Church. “What’s the Lord doing? Why is he sending us all of these young men?”

The very worst way for feminists to respond to this development would be to demonize it and try to shut it down. Consider that, to many conservatives in the 1960s, it seemed as if women had collectively gone mad. Suddenly, they began to act—so it appeared—entirely against their own interests. Yes, the duties of a housewife had shrunk considerably over the past century or so as many industries moved out of homes and into factories, but what of it? Surely this couldn’t be any reason to repudiate the comfortable position marked out for the middle class wife and mother?

Now consider the way that many traditional masculine jobs have disappeared with off-shoring and automation. Consider the way that some of the right-wing voting patterns that have arisen as a result of this have been described as red states “voting against their own interest.” Consider the way that many left-wing solutions to these problems focus purely on material concerns. Consider how many of the problems besetting young men are precisely the sorts of things that require self-control and personal development in response: drug use crises, greater access to gambling apps, and meaningless distractions in the form of porn, video games, and social media. Finding a community to give you more structure in life is a sensible reaction!

I’ve seen young right-wing men declare that it is particularly stupid to allow a crisis of meaning amongst young men, of all people. But to a feminist, the most obvious reason to take seriously the possibility of sweeping social change in response to a society that refuses to allow sufficient outlets for the drive toward meaning is that women already did it. We ought to be able to sympathise. Instead, too often, we ignore the situation, or offer patronizing solutions, or simply treat men who respond in this way as a threat.

Now, to be fair, a lot of these men are specifically seeking a “thick” view of human nature—not just the open-ended notion of equal human dignity that liberalism might provide, but a rich set of patterns to follow and rules to shape your character. This is understandable, but it also means that these men are engaging specifically with the parts of religious tradition that are most deeply intertwined with reductive and instrumental characterisations of women. Even when giving these developments the best possible interpretation, the threat to women’s flourishing is real.

What feminists have to ask is, are we responding to this threat in the direction of greater meaning and deeper human flourishing for everyone? Or are we shutting down the articulation of meaning out of fear that we might be excluded from it? The right way to respond to this situation is to rediscover our ability to advocate positively for our own complex human nature, our own search for meaning, our own need for purpose in life.

Perhaps, therefore, it should not be surprising that, when responding to new converts with reductive views of women, religious belief has the potential to be an advantage rather than a disadvantage. , a pro-natalist conservative Catholic writer, wrote a post denouncing “fertility idolatry” on Substack early last year. “In this worldview,” she writes, “any woman who falls short of their ideal essentially ceases to bear the image of God. ‘Complete womanhood’—and even salvation, to the evangelical types—is reduced to one criterion: childbearing.”

In the context of Roy’s Catholicism, the term idolatry for this phenomenon is precisely correct, but we should note one specific element. Often, idolatry refers to the sin of elevating some other thing above God in your own life. Here, however, we see instead that childbearing is being recommended above God for other people; specifically, women. This is an inflicted idolatry. Recall Beauvoir’s words: “this fall is a moral fall if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil.” Roy’s formulation captures this precisely. Being Catholic does not make Roy less able to respond to this problem. It actually gives her a very helpful way of characterising it.

IX. Pluralist Feminism

So, should feminists go out and join a religion? It depends. If you have a place you are already thinking of going, and this is the prompt you need to get you out the door and down the road, then, sure! Go, and talk with people about the deep questions, and gain networks, and learn how to hold your worldview alongside other people who will inevitably bring their own takes to it. All of these are good things.

But if you don’t feel well placed for this, then I am the last person who would tell you to compromise beyond the point of sincerity. I, for one, hold within my agnosticism a blasphemy taboo so strong that any form of worship not centred mainly on silence feels wrong. I can’t say things I don’t mean. I am also lucky, because there is a healthy liberal Quaker meeting in my area and I can worship with them, but I don’t expect everyone who might have a tricky relationship with religion to be able to find an equally good solution.

There are good reasons to be careful. Just any worldview will not do. Precisely because human nature is not completely malleable, it is possible to get women very, very wrong. Human nature does not start with ideology, it starts with people. Wherever you are, within religion or outside it, our conversations have to include ourselves and the reality of our lives.

Liberalism increases the risk that we will fail to extend our arguments far enough into our deep motivations and broad worldviews, but it does not prevent us from looking to religion, to secular philosophy, to our communities, or to people who inspire us, in order to find articulations that we can draw on. Whatever your worldview, consider this essay to be an exhortation to use it, if you have one, or, if you don’t, then to think more deeply about how you might find a grounding that allows you to understand who you are and what you care about.

Feminism has always had elements to it that address these questions. There is plenty of prior work to draw on. As we do, we should note the ways in which those earlier feminists have been inspired by broader worldviews in the process. Feminists cannot afford to let that context slide, both for women’s own sake, and because feminists need to be able to respond to men’s search for meaning and structure in a constructive fashion. To the extent that taking on such deeper philosophy leads to disagreements between feminists, we should welcome the debate; a vibrant argument is much better than listlessness!

I don’t expect the resulting negotiations to be easy. There is no denying that when the aspirations of young right-wing men are placed alongside the stubbornly important gains of the feminist movement, a synthesis is hard to find. Taylor’s maximal demand is maximal indeed! Engagement with the deep questions is the only thing that will give us any chance of responding adequately to the challenges it poses. We need to be able to articulate and defend a substantial and positive vision of what we aim for in life.

At the beginning of the year I spent at Cambridge, I met a man who would go on to be a good friend while I was there. He was an aesthetically-oriented conservative who studied Anglo-Saxon literature and wrote poetry inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We disagreed on a lot of things.

He floated, early on, the idea that women would be just as happy in the home as in the workplace; perhaps even more so. “I can’t speak for everyone,” I told him in response. “Perhaps some women might. But I recoil with horror at the idea of being a Dorothea Brooke or an Isobel Archer, forced to attempt to satisfy my ambitions with marriage!”

He blinked, and then said, in the confused tone of a British person encountering an unexpected display of emotion, “You’re very passionate about this.”

What gets me about his reaction, still, is that he honestly seemed surprised. I will never understand why. Did he believe, somehow, in the existence of a woman who would travel halfway around the world to study mathematics, just on a lark? Would this hypothetical woman have walked into the Trinity College library, signed her name in the big red book, alongside that book’s scuffed red predecessor opened at the signature of Newton, and shrugged? Would her extraordinarily difficult studies be undertaken out of some listless sense of duty to succeed, in the absence of anything better to do?

He got the message, I made sure of that. After a while, he and the other conservative-leaning student of our acquaintance developed a habit of tacking “… but of course, Gemma will be allowed to study mathematics” onto any suggested rearrangement of the world that could threaten my ability to do so. I didn’t believe them for a minute, of course. I knew I’d be just as out of luck as anyone else, if any of their late-night pub discussion ideas came to fruition. But I appreciated it, for all that. I wanted them to at least know they were threatening something I cared deeply for.

Alas, such ideas no longer just belong to late-night pub discussions among graduate students. Helen Andrews made a splash last year with an article in Compact, making the simultaneously-implausible pair of claims that, firstly, the influx of women into professions such as law and academia poses “a threat to civilization” and, secondly, that this threat can be fixed merely by “restoring fair rules” in a meritocratic system. Her argument is tailor-made to be defended in bad faith: nobody is going to take away women’s rights, and anyway it would be good if they did.

Accelerating this trend, The Atlantic reported last December that the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative US think tank, has hired one Scott Yenor, formerly of the far-right Claremont Institute. Yenor’s views on women’s rights are not subtle or hard to find. “[W]e need a new gender ideology, one that restores a workable patriarchy,” he explains in a 2021 article for First Things. Among other things, he laments that “Educational institutions, often abetted by overeager parents, cheerlead for female professional success. This needs to stop.”

To truly reverse the feminist gains of the 20th century would be an uphill battle; many such advances are both legally and societally entrenched. Still, attention to the philosophical grounding beneath women’s full participation in society remains important. It matters that people understand why we do this. It matters that, throughout society, we treat women as human beings who are worthy of—nay, called to—a well-rounded kind of development as people.

I actually don’t know if I’d have ended up at Cambridge had it not been for a lecturer at my undergraduate institution in New Zealand who had studied there, himself. He encouraged me to apply, and after I was accepted he gave me advice on how to navigate the place. You have to list your top three desired colleges in order of preference. There are lots of reasons to pick one college over another: history, student population, prestige, vibes. Some colleges are choosier than others about the students they take. Trinity, my lecturer noted, is very choosy, because the place has a lot of money and resources.

I mentioned at least one other college to him first, and then, in an appropriately diffident Kiwi manner, noted that Trinity might be nice.

“Well, don’t bother putting them as your second choice,” he told me. “I did, and I shouldn’t have. They already have plenty of applicants putting them first.”

“Oh,” I said. “So perhaps I shouldn’t list them at all? I mean, they might not take me anyway.”

Being a Kiwi himself, he understood exactly where this was coming from, and he didn’t give me any guff about “putting myself forward,” like an American would. He simply looked me in the eye and said, in a level tone, “You are their type. You are smart and mathematical. If you list them first, there is a decent chance they will accept you. But don’t put them second.”

I did not put them second.

When people refer to civil rights as “individual rights,” they have failed to notice the meaning of the word “civil.” Participation in society is not an individual act. Civil rights are facilitated by society and are employed in order to contribute to society. And although civil rights provide a baseline level of support for everybody’s civic participation, they could never be enough on their own. We are all reliant on the generosity of others—on our fellow citizens’ liberality in helping us find our way. Nobody can force that, not really. We can only point out why it’s good.

Writing at , recently invoked the threat to women’s rights as a way of arguing for individualist liberalism. “This is a terrible idea,” he says, of driving women out of the workplace, “but it’s hard to explain why it’s a terrible idea without recourse to old-fashioned ideas like judging people on their own merits rather than as manifestations of groups.”

If he’s right, then the prospect for women is grim. For this would mean that there is no positive good that we can point to, in women’s full participation in society, that might lead us to support it. Women’s rights, Yglesias implies, are only defensible as a side effect of individualist liberal procedures. Yet who would bother to defend a mere procedural outcome with nothing substantive to recommend it?

Women’s rights should not arise from seeing women as isolated individuals, to be evaluated for “merit” and included or excluded from opportunities on that basis. Women’s rights should arise from seeing women as beneficiaries of and contributors to a society that honours the ability of its citizens to seek good lives for themselves and to help others to seek good lives in return.

We support the ability of women to seek professional success because a just society ought to be particularly solicitous toward its citizens’ ability to seek good things. This includes freedom of religion, of course, and also the freedom to reject religion in favour of other philosophies or indeed in favour of something you can’t define. It includes personal excellences, be they physical or intellectual. It includes interpersonal relationships, in the form of the ability to associate with other people. It includes family formation (and not just for traditional families). It includes the ability to contribute to society by working a job.

It was impossible, at Cambridge, not to remember that the intellectual arts were once religious arts. It was built into the very stones, our cross-shaped Great Hall, the chapels at all the older colleges, the constantly-visible history of the place. That friend I mentioned, at the start? He was deeply enamoured of it, musing about whether it might not be better to have lived back in the days when being a scholar meant being religiously celibate, dedicated to a calling.

I protested, of course, at the exclusion of women. He suggested nunneries, and I scoffed. Then I back-tracked, referencing Hildegard of Bingen, and he had the grace to look a little ashamed as he muttered “Actually, she was kind of an exception.”

He was an intellectually honest person. There were reasons why I liked him. It wasn’t until I went back and read my diaries after I left that I realised—on the basis of some indicators that were fairly blatant when I came to think about it—that he was almost certainly gay. There is a lot about him that appears rather different, in retrospect.

Notwithstanding the context, at no point in my time at Cambridge did I interpret my love of mathematics as being even potentially related to religion. There is a lot about me that appears rather different, in retrospect, too.

The good is a contested category, and sometimes we don’t know, ourselves, why we want a thing, even when we’re right to want it. Liberalism lets us go for it anyway. But if you want me to justify my love of mathematics now? I barely even need to invoke the questionable authority of my own mathematically-inflected spiritual experience. As a tool for learning to seek objective truth, goodness and beauty, mathematics is a classic. In fact, it is the classic, ever since Plato.

Yet this argument is too easy, and too small. I don’t just want a little carve-out that “of course Gemma will be allowed to study mathematics.” The freedom to seek the good is so much bigger than a single subject, or a single person. I would like to believe that the good is singular, but I’m pretty sure that different people find it in different ways. We should care about people’s ability to seek a wide variety of experiences.

Fundamental to my position here is that it can be genuinely difficult to say, for any given person, what they ought to be doing with their lives. Finding a good path is hard. A conservative might respond that this is why we need society to provide us with guidance. People sometimes do not know what is good for them, so can we really leave these things up to the individual to decide?

The problem with this response is not that we can be assumed to know what is good for ourselves—sometimes we do not—but rather that we are not always good at knowing what is good for other people, either. A liberal order provides us with some support, and some limitations, while leaving the highest (and hardest) questions about the good to open debates and freely-accepted quests.

Any movement that wants, instead, to have power over people’s ability to seek the good is going to have to justify itself against the harm it can do. Yet the overt misogyny seeping into movement conservatism does not appear to have a good grasp on anybody’s well-being. Consider Scott Yenor again, who in that First Things piece linked above complains of modern marriage that “all concerned must ‘share their feelings’ and ‘listen,’ and render other services that women naturally both desire and provide.” Without a trace of irony, he then goes on to complain of “the emotional damage divorce does to men,” given their comparative lack of social connections compared to women.

Yenor is certainly doing a good job of demonstrating that we as humans sometimes do not know what is good for us! Socially connecting with another person requires attention to that person. There is no substitute for this. By all means advocate patience across differences in communication style, but there’s no free lunch here. Forcing couples to stay together will not magically make it possible to get the benefits of social connection without the work of sincere interaction.

The idea that we should trust people like this to limit our freedoms in the name of “the good life” is absurd. Yenor wouldn’t know how to promote human flourishing if he tried. His worldview is based on a garbled mixture of sex stereotyping, disdain for women, and wishful thinking. Resistance to this kind of prejudice should not rely on liberal procedures without further justification! We can fight this easily, on the merits, if we bother to try.

It’s time to insist that liberal norms have a purpose; multiple purposes, actually. The obvious one is peace, as liberalism gives us systems and practices that encourage us to work out our differences by way of persuasion, and employs a system of protective rights so that people will be less likely to turn to violence in order to protect what matters to them. But another very important purpose of liberalism is to allow people to seek and advocate for their best vision of the good life.

A healthy liberal order arises not from procedure without disagreement but from good faith debate about the things that matter. It is best defended, not by clinging to recitations of “rights” and “individualist principles,” but by full-hearted advocacy for the power of civil liberties to allow people to lead better lives.

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So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him.

Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else.

In our days, when writers and scientists have so oddly usurped the place of priests, the public acknowledges, with a totally unjustified docility, that the artistic and scientific faculties are sacred. This is generally held to be self-evident, though it is very far from being so. If any reason is felt to be called for, people allege that the free play of these faculties is one of the highest manifestations of the human personality.

Often it is, indeed, no more than that.

—Simone Weil

What is liberty for? Do we need it to express ourselves, or is liberty for expressing something beyond us? In a piece written close to the end of her life, Simone Weil advocates for the latter. You should not be yourself, or express yourself. Still less should you subsume yourself in a collective! No, the truly correct option, according to Weil, is to be neither yourself, nor part of the crowd, but rather to draw upon the perfectly impersonal.

What is sacred in science is truth; what is sacred in art is beauty. Truth and beauty are impersonal. All this is too obvious.

If a child is doing a sum and does it wrong, the mistake bears the stamp of his personality. If he does the sum exactly right, his personality does not enter into it at all.

The phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” predates Simone Weil by several centuries. It is not at all obvious that beauty is impersonal. However, it is entirely characteristic of Simone Weil to say exactly what she wants to say without regard for whether it will meet with agreement. She is aiming for the impersonal. Of course.

Me? I’m a good liberal. I couch philosophical statements in personal stories, eliding universal claims.

Last August, I was partway through the essay on Human Personality when I decided to take my copy of Simone Weil: An Anthology down to the wharf. I made it halfway down the hill when I heard an alarm. Directly to my right, a heavily-chained bike lock fell to the ground as a man replaced the seat on a scuffed e-bike. I turned, startled, and asked the obvious question.

“Are you stealing that bike?”

He started wheeling the bike away and I grabbed the back of it.

“It’s my bike,” he said.

“I just saw you take the chain off it. It’s lying right there. The alarm is still ringing.”

“I’m just borrowing it.”

“I’m not going to let you take somebody’s bike! My bike was stolen last year and it was awful—“

For a moment we faced each other across the bike. I wondered if he would try to wrest it from my grip. He did not. He ran off. I let him.

The alarm had fallen silent now that nobody was trying to move the bike. I could see the chain that had held the bike, still coiled around the arched pole to which it had been affixed. Presumably, I could wrap it back around the seat of the bike—as its owner must have mistakenly done—but that did not seem correct. Somebody might take the bike if it wasn’t protected.

It was nearing five. Perhaps the bike’s owner would be off work soon? I pulled out my book and started to read.

Here is a question. Was preventing the bike from being stolen a personal act, or an impersonal one? Because it definitely had some pretty personal elements. I cared about this bike because of the time our e-bike got taken by an obviously-professional thief who neatly sliced through its D-lock in the time my husband took to step into the supermarket for ten minutes. I also cared about the theft because it was happening in my neighbourhood, in broad daylight. I had a quite indignant sense of local pride, even. Not on my street. Not if I can prevent it.

Yet it is no contravention of Simone Weil’s philosophy to be located in, and attached to, a particular place. Nor indeed would my instinctive sympathy with the bike’s owner be disallowed. Perhaps I ought also to sympathise with the thief? Yet I know nothing of him, not really. Impersonally, he ought not to have tried to take the bike.

My husband texted me back like a millennial, with line breaks providing the main punctuation: “what / oh dear / have you called the cops?” I had not. I didn’t see the point. They didn’t do much when our bike got stolen, and presumably they would do less for an unsuccessful theft.

I understand the impulse to call the police. Justice has been violated; justice is meant to be kept by the police. You can’t actually order justice from the justice store, though. What would justice even be, in this case? Could I realistically get closer to it than the bike does not get stolen in the first place? On the whole, I reckoned I was close enough.

My husband sounded, in his texts, like he was glad we weren’t calling the police if only so he could have one less task to think about. I felt a bit bad, honestly. He was out taking our son to ride his child-sized bike around the square, which is quite stressful enough on its own. I waited for my husband to show up in his own time, re-opened the book, and kept reading.

“Although the personal and the impersonal are opposed, there is a way from the one to the other. But there is no way from the collective to the impersonal. A collectivity must dissolve into separate persons before the impersonal can be reached.” Is that true? It appeals to me; I have always needed solitude. Yet I am also part of a dyad, and I suspect I am better for it. The responsibility for that e-bike was shared, as soon as I told my husband about it. All I have I share with you remains our most amusing wedding vow, in hindsight.

“Have you tried asking in all the shops? The owner must be somewhere around here.”

I gestured to the tall buildings, with their rows of windows. “More likely it’s someone in an office.”

My husband conceded the point. “You could—wait, no!” Our son was pedalling away at an alarming rate. “He wants the donut shop. I can’t—sorry, I can’t help you, I have to—”

My husband raced off after our kid. I stayed by the bike. We’d figure something out after the donuts. In the meantime, well, I had come out here to read. So I kept reading. The essay might actually have been making more sense, there by the side of the road, than it would have down on the wharf. Being interrupted was forcing me to read the same passage multiple times. I think perhaps Simone Weil does not write for shimmering harbours with yachts gliding past in the distance. She writes for dusty city streets when you’re doing something you’re not particularly enjoying, with pauses between the paragraphs and other cares on your mind.

One of Weil’s many striking claims is that we should not ground our defence of humanity in the idea of human rights. Instead of rights, Weil suggests we refer to justice, to obligation, and to sympathy with the afflicted.

I agree on the substance; I don’t think our humanity is best described by the rights we have or ought to have. I disagree on the practicalities. I don’t think an appeal to humanity is more politically feasible than an appeal to rights, because actually seeing people in the first place is a very strong demand—still more so when the person in question is experiencing a distress whose full comprehension might ask something of you, as Weil herself acknowledges. Rights are a less demanding simplification.

When my husband returned, we took the small cable lock that we use for our son’s bike, and used it to tether the e-bike. I wrote a note: “Somebody tried to steal your bike! I live just up the street. Call me on [number] and I’ll unlock it.” Then I wedged the note as tightly as I could into the crevice between the seat and the frame. If it blew away, our son’s bike lock could probably be broken through easily enough if you really needed to.

I hoped the note wouldn’t blow away. I hoped nobody would notice the small lock and see another theft chance. I hoped I was doing the right thing.

The right thing to do can vary significantly depending on the situation. Can something be impersonal and specific? I suppose it can. Weil is not advocating undifferentiated sameness. Her impersonal absolutism should not be mistaken for the detachment of managerialism or scientism. She is not trying to exclude our humanity; she is trying to find its essential centre. She can write against “personality” for the same reason that Plato can suggest expelling the poets from his perfect Republic—because it is being discarded in favour of something that includes its important aspects but is more true.

Weil still sees value in the arts, though her standards are high.

When science, art, literature and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.

Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and André Gide come in for a rough dismissal, by this measure. The Iliad, Aeschylus, Sophocles, King Lear, and Phèdre earn her nod.

I think we would probably not have Lear if Shakespeare had not had the experience of writing many prior plays. For that matter, I think we would not have Lear if there were not other playwrights making other plays that we have mostly forgotten. If art has no rights, but truth and beauty are self-justifying, then by what stair shall we ascend to such heights? To include Lear is to include poetry writ large. Contrastingly, the exclusion of poetry in the Republic declares a kind of perfection, in its to-be-achieved philosophy, that is complete enough to need no scaffolding.

Are rights also a kind of scaffolding? There are essential aspects of our humanity that rights will always fail to reach. We might do better to pause, and try to understand, and act justly. Yet this too is a great height. Perhaps the correct technique, here, is to see rights and personality and democratic freedoms as precious not for themselves but for the good that shelters within their expanse.

I got a call a couple of hours later. “Hello,” said a woman on the other end of the connection. “Are you the person who saved me from a nasty surprise?”

The note had not blown away. Nobody had stolen the bike in the interim. I unlocked our cable and returned the bike to its owner.

She left a bottle of wine on our doorstep the next morning.

Should I be braver? Should I make more universal claims? I shelter in the lee of liberal rights. I am free to express my personality. If, within or beyond that personality, there is some essential element that is hard to pinpoint and impossible to do without, then I am simply not obliged to define it.

In some ways, rights enable humility. I need not claim any sort of divine calling, in order to follow what matters to me. I can simply act, according to my own lights.

Rights protect our attempts at truth and beauty and justice, but do they also enable mediocrity? If we eliminate some of the need for justification, we may need to speak less often of higher forms of justice. If we eliminate some of our need for agreement, it becomes possible to strive less for truth. It may not be enough merely to be free to seek beauty; it make take more than that to help us find it.

Coercion cannot be right, though, in the highest things. The self-justifications of justice and truth and beauty ought to be enough to lead us on, if only we remind ourselves to follow.

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I have not hesitated to make side remarks upon whatever catches my fancy, be that the ethics of expertise, the social effects of precise time, or the Problem of Evil. I have, however, managed to confine the bit about real analysis to a lengthy footnote that can be skipped.

It was the holidays, okay? I promise I’ll recover my self-control in future.

I. Pendulum

Galileo Galilei created the first known design for a pendulum clock in around 1637, a few years before he died. It was never built, but the underlying principle was that the period of a pendulum does not depend on its amplitude. So even though, over time, the extent of the pendulum’s sway will decay, the time it takes to go from one side to the other will remain the same. Galileo is said to have first noticed this fact about pendulums in the cathedral at Pisa. The story goes that he was attending mass when he looked up, observed a swaying lamp, and timed it with his pulse.

Like many Galileo stories, this one is disputed. Vincenzio Viviani knew Galileo personally, and his account of Galileo’s life is certainly based on fact. But there are places where we know he was, uh, creative with detail, and that calls some of his other claims into question. “At that time,” explains historian of science Michael Segre, “history could still be written as a moral lesson, as a forum for philosophical or religious ideas, or even as part of a literary enterprise.” Still, Segre makes a documented case that Viviani, who was himself both perfectionist and empiricist, did care about getting things right.

In an earlier post on science and virtue ethics, I claimed that greater precision in how we relate history is influenced by the development of scientific ideas about truth. But the relationship is not a straightforward one, because there is a step in the middle that involves developing practices for finding and understanding historical facts. The subject of history requires its own specialised virtues. The practices used by modern historians in seeking truth are not always followed even by modern scientists, when relating history. Viviani was a Renaissance scientist, and we should not be surprised that he wrote history as it was written in the Renaissance.

In this case, the timeline given by Viviani for Galileo’s initial realisation about the pendulum doesn’t match what we know about when the existing lamp was put in. On the other hand, Galileo himself emphasises the use of a human pulse to measure time, so that part of the story is entirely plausible. It could have been a different lamp; it could have happened later than Viviani said; it could be a story told to keep the interest of the audience. But wherever Galileo got the idea, Galileo’s own writings explain that he went on to experiment with lengthy pendulum observations, timed not by pulse but by water clock, and comparing the period of a heavy lead pendulum with a lighter cork one1.

Galileo made two claims: that the pendulum’s period does not depend on the amplitude, and that the pendulum’s period does not depend on the pendulum’s mass. Both claims have issues, yet each of these claims is powerful. The lack of dependence on amplitude is actually only nearly true, and only when the oscillations are small (as they would have been for most of a long experiment, because the larger swings would have died down quite quickly). Once people had that figured out, though, it became possible to make extremely accurate clocks by using an escapement that would automatically limit the size of the swing. Pendulum clocks were the most precise timekeepers in the world from the mid-seventeenth century right up through the first few decades of the twentieth.

As for the lack of dependence on mass, it’s complicated by the effect of air resistance. When released from a wide angle, a cork pendulum will initially swing with a smaller period than a lead one because it will reach the smaller amplitudes more quickly. Without the effect of air resistance, however, this claim really does check out, whether the swing of the pendulum is wide or narrow. It’s a sub-category of the fact that the motion of an object under gravity is in general not dependent on the object’s mass. On the Earth’s surface, minus the effect of air resistance, absolutely everything accelerates downward at about 9.8 metres per second squared, whether it is heavy or light.

Galileo had an eye for invariances. As a natural philosopher he was a staunch advocate of mathematics and of measurement; he was looking for a geometry of motion. In addition to the above-mentioned invariance in what we would now call gravitational motion, he also gave a description of invariance under inertia. He used a ship as an example, but these days it is more common to reference a train. Specifically, if you’re on a train next to another train, sometimes it can be hard to tell whether your train is moving or the other one is. You can see the other train move, and mistakenly think that it’s because you’re moving, or vice versa. The laws of physics in a train carriage moving in a straight line at a constant speed are the same as those in a train carriage at rest. Unless you’re accelerating, it can be hard to tell if you’re moving or not.

Einstein referred to this as the “principle of relativity” because one way of responding to this is to make the ontological claim that there’s no such thing as being absolutely at rest. Instead, inertial (i.e. non-accelerating) motion is only ever “moving” or “stopped” relative to some designated (non-accelerating) object that we define as “at rest.” This principle, from which Einstein’s theories of relativity get their name, was not invented by Einstein. It was developed from Galileo’s observation, long before Einstein entered the scene.

You might be thinking, in that case, what did Einstein do? The answer is that Einstein found a way of reconciling this principle with our understanding of electromagnetism. You see, Maxwell’s electromagnetic laws prescribe the speed of electromagnetic waves (such as light) in a vacuum. That’s potentially a problem, because the principle of relativity forces us to ask, speed relative to what? If light is a wave, then it should probably be speed relative to the medium in which the wave propagates, but if the light is in a vacuum then what’s it propagating in? For a while, people thought the answer was some sort of universally present “luminiferous ether.” But in that case, if we’re smart, we should be able to measure our own motion relative to the luminiferous ether by observing the behaviour of light relative to the Earth’s motion. Maybe we could even define the motion (or otherwise) of objects relative to this ether, wherever it is.

Problem is, they couldn’t find it. Best anyone could tell, with cleverly-calibrated and extremely sensitive experiments, light seems to be travelling at the same speed no matter who does the measurement or how the measurement equipment is moving.

II. Inconvenience

Story time. When I was at Cambridge, a fellow student asked me for book recommendations on physics. He was a postmodernist, and he wanted to know about relativity and quantum mechanics as seen by physicists. I’d spent most of my teens reading popular books on the subject and could compare with the more mathematical knowledge I’d gained on those subjects in undergrad, so it was easy enough to send him to the book I thought clearest and best.

He came back to me a few days later with a question. He’d read the first couple of chapters and he reckoned the relativity stuff mostly made sense. I mean, time being different for different observers, that checks out, he said. Variations in measured spatial differences, likewise. But he had a problem with the speed of light being the same for all observers. “Isn’t that just a bit—convenient?” he asked.

Yeah, he really said that.

Now, I was in the middle of eating breakfast at the time, and I’m afraid I wasn’t very thorough with my response. I believe I simply gave him look and said “Um, no.” I could have tried to give him a lengthy explanation as to why this fact is really not convenient at all, but it would have taken a while, and, you know, breakfast.

It really isn’t convenient, though.

Look at it like this. If I’m on train #1, going north, and I see train #2 going north at what to me looks like a speed of 3 units, and you’re on the ground and you see the same train #2 going north at 4 units, then my speed must be your measurement minus my measurement, right? So my speed is 1.

So let’s do that with light. I’m on a train, going north at speed 1, and you’re on the ground shining a beam of light northward. I measure the speed of the light, which turns out to be2 300,000,000. You measure the speed of the light, and you also get 300,000,000 because the speed of light is the same for all observers3. So my speed must be your measurement minus my measurement, like before with that train that was going at speed 3 relative to me. So my speed is 0. So 0 equals 1.

Folks, this is not convenient. This is very, very bad.

Now, playing devil’s advocate, you might want to argue with me that this is still convenient, because luminiferous ether, if it existed, would potentially contradict the ontological—dare I say, metaphysical—claim that there’s no such thing as being absolutely at rest. I won’t deny that there are reasons someone might prefer that ontological view; Einstein did. It’s more symmetrical, in the way that physicists use the term. Just as mirror symmetry4 means that something looks the same in a mirror, and rotational symmetry means that something looks the same when you turn it some specified angle, what we have here is a kind of symmetry in the laws of physics between motions at a constant speed.

So, sure, the situation with everyone seeing light moving at the same speed might be more beautiful, except that “0 equals 1” is ugly no matter how you look at it. We can fix this problem, but, in the process, a lot of apparently obvious things will have to change.

Here’s a relevant theoretical consideration. What would happen if, instead of using a pendulum, we used a reflected beam of light to measure time? Let’s make the light beam move vertically between mirrors that are a distance of 1.5 units apart. In the slightly-abstract units that I’ve set up, that means the light travels the 3 units up and back in 0.000000001 units of time.

But what if this “light clock” is moving? That would mean that the light is travelling a bit further, right? It has to travel the hypotenuses of the pair of triangles on the right:

If the “light clock” is moving at a low speed, then these triangles are going to be pretty narrow, so the hypotenuse won’t be that much longer, but it will be a little bit longer. The light is still travelling at the same speed—it has to—so the clock will be just a teensy bit slower to measure its 0.000000001 units of time. This is one of the simplest ways to see one of the most well-known facts about relativistic physics. Moving clocks run slow, whether they are “light clocks” or not5.

Even more confusingly, this “relativity” in the passage of time is itself relative. From the ground, it looks like time on a moving train runs a little bit slower. From the train, however, it looks as though time on the ground is running a little bit slower. (Symmetry!) You should expect this apparent6 paradox, because the entire point of this whole exercise was to keep that principle about relativity of motion that was already perceptible to Galileo.

Keeping track of these kinds of changes in time and space is the key to solving the addition-of-speeds problem so that it no longer gives us that horrible “0 equals 1” effect that we saw above. I’ll spare you the math. What I want you to notice is that the invariance of the speed of light for all observers is directly related to this very precise but deeply weird distortion in the passage of time depending on the speed of the clock that does the measurement. The relativity of time and the invariance of light speed aren’t opposites. The rigidity of the latter is part of what forces the flexibility of the former.

Anyway, this is the explanation that I didn’t give to that postmodernist. I took another mouthful of eggs, instead.

Not long afterwards, I learned that he had found himself seated near a physics professor at a formal dinner. Emboldened by the copious amounts of available alcohol, he attempted to make his point about the “convenience” of the speed of light in a vacuum being the same for all observers. I would dearly love to have seen the conversation. Alas, I had to be satisfied with watching our mutual friends rag him about it afterwards!

To his credit, he gamely submitted to the general merriment at his expense. His one moment of protest was when he ventured in his own defense that that if we had been seated next to a critical theorist and had tried to have a conversation about Derrida then we wouldn’t have been very successful, either. This is probably true, although at the time I remember thinking that it was also rather unlikely that we would have tried! Then again, in this piece I myself am certainly ranging quite freely outward from my own areas of formal education, so I suppose I had better be a little cautious.

I do think that there is something very dark about the notion that obscurity of one’s subject ought to be seen as status-inducing. I know it plays out that way for physics, sometimes, but I think it matters that this is not the point. Ideas, when they are difficult, should be difficult for some reason beyond the allure of obscurity. In the case of relativity, there is an immediate purpose here—namely, the rectification of an inconsistency between electromagnetics and mechanics—that feeds into a broader purpose of attempting to accurately describe the physical world.

Of course, we must therefore ask if relativistic mechanics does accurately describe the physical world. It took a surprisingly long time to test it directly; the committee for the Nobel Prize in Physics actually got tired of waiting and instead gave the award to Einstein for a different 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect that was a crucial step on the way to quantum mechanics. Einstein himself suggested testing the relativistic Doppler effect of light, but it took until 1938 to successfully implement that experiment.

It gets harder to accelerate things the closer they get to the speed of light, and this effect is stronger for more massive objects, so it’s quite hard to get a strong relativistic time dilation effect on a large object. On the other hand, small particles are regularly accelerated to an appreciable fraction of light speed in particle colliders, and relativistic effects in how long it takes them to decay have been thoroughly observed. But if you want the kind of direct experimental verification of the time dilation effect that you might most easily imagine—in which one clock moves, and another one remains stationary, and then we compare them—well, that took even longer to become possible. We needed to build a better clock. The first experiment of this nature was the Hafele-Keating experiment in 1971, and it used a caesium-133 atomic clock, operating on a principle that was prototyped in 1955.

Time has changed; or, at least, our measurement of it certainly has. Prior to the development of pendulum clocks, it was normal for a timekeeping device to lose about 15 minutes a day. True time was kept by the sun, and everything else was a rough estimate. By contrast, even quite early pendulum clocks would lose no more than 15 seconds per day. Time could be measured more precisely, and that meant we could be held to it more precisely, too.

Einstein’s discovery of a relativity in how different observers measure time led to speculation that these strictures might be loosened. Perhaps we might no longer expect everyone to be precisely tethered to the same time measurements? It hasn’t played out that way, though. Relativistic time dilation is a vanishingly small effect in most situations. For specific applications where it makes a difference, we just take it into account and keep on measuring, as precisely as we can.

We don’t even define our units of time by the sun any more. The official definition of a second is the time taken for 9192631770 vibrations of a light wave7 coming from the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition of a caesium-133 atom. We do sometimes add leap seconds so we can stay in phase with the sun, however.

You are probably reading this on a device that is regularly updating the time it tells you, based on International Atomic Time. You probably carry such a device around with you most of the time. You are tethered in a quotidian fashion to the time measured by a few hundred atomic clocks in laboratories around the world. Relative time? You wish. We are all, almost always, absurdly in synch.

III. Heartbeats

I have to admit, the considerations in my last couple of paragraphs made me feel a bit queasy, when I first thought of them. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad that atomic clocks exist. I consider it a remarkable human achievement that we can measure time so precisely that we are able to perceive the tiny relativistic variations in it, and of course it is only natural that we would use the same technology to keep track of our own local time, as a species. But is it good that we live our lives constantly checking it? Have we made ourselves slaves to a bunch of caesium atoms?

So—it being the summer holidays, after all—I left my phone on the floor when I woke up the next day, in the bunk room of a large house up in the mountains where we and the relatives were staying for a couple of nights. My husband and kid were keen to go to the pools and so was I, so we walked over there as soon as we felt like it without bothering to check the time. And when I had a moment, I left my husband to accompany my kid down the hydroslides, and wandered over to sit in the geothermally heated water that gives the original raison d’être to the water park.

I sat in the water, and timed things with my pulse. It took 92 heartbeats for all the bubbles to pop after I swirled the water. It took 43 heartbeats for a cute little kid to navigate the long ramp out of the water. A sparrow hopped on a nearby rock for 11 heartbeats.

Most natural processes are pretty irregular. It cannot have been simple to find timings that would repeat in a predictable fashion.

Easier to find one when you know what to try, of course. I tapped the surface from below with a finger and timed the resulting circular wavefront. Two heartbeats to be over the vent at the bottom. Not very accurate, but it didn’t need to be. I dragged my finger across the same distance, faster than two heartbeats. There it was, a triangular wave: gentler than, but still analogous to, the Mach wave caused by objects that travel faster than the speed of sound.

Ernst Mach is best known, these days, for his work on supersonic fluid mechanics, including the calculation of the wave produced by the movement of a supersonic object. The resulting crack is known as a sonic boom. In the water where I was sitting, the triangular surface wave behind my finger made a much more familiar sight, like the bow wave of many a ship.

Mach was a polymath, though. He had interests in physiology and psychology, and his philosophy of science had a profound influence on Albert Einstein—sometimes as inspiration, and sometimes as foil.

Mach credited his philosophical awakening to reading Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics at age fifteen. Kant distinguishes very carefully between things in themselves, and things as we perceive them, and stresses that we only have access to the latter. Mach, seeing no use for the former if we can’t even perceive it, developed what was termed in his time a ‘phenomenological physics,’ in which theory is essentially a summary of experiment, a way of efficiently condensing the empirical facts that we experience.

Mach wanted to remove metaphysics from science altogether. But what did Mach mean by “metaphysics”? Presumably, he meant whatever Kant meant by it.

Well, if Mach could handle Kant’s Prolegomena at fifteen, I reckoned I could probably handle it at forty, so I downloaded Paul Carus’ translation8 from Project Gutenberg and read it from start to finish.

IV. Geometry

Famously and influentially, Kant’s main definition of metaphysics is that it consists of a priori statements that are synthetic rather than analytical. Analytical statements, per Kant, are those that explain what we already meant by our terms, or logically expand on a definition. Synthetic statements have actual content. A priori knowledge is knowledge prior to experience. So “synthetic a priori” knowledge is substantial but not empirical. It’s a conceptually pleasing definition. Obviously, it’s also controversial.

The interesting thing about reading Kant’s Prolegomena with my background is that Kant makes extensive use of mathematics and physics in order to demonstrate his desired approach on subjects less controversial than God or the soul or the nature of physical substance. It’s wonderful: sharp, elegant, thought-provoking, and, from the point of view of the 21st century, also a bit of a hot mess. I love it.

Space and time, says Kant, are part of that synthetic a priori. They are not experienced; rather, they are part of how we interpret our experience. We need them to make sense of our sensations; thus, they must be prior to empirical perception.

Kant makes the fascinating and fateful argument that this inherent perceptual aspect of space and time makes these things more certain, not less. Precisely because we are unable to perceive objects in any other way, we can be sure that this aspect of our understanding will not change. Thus, it does not make sense to ask “Does [Euclidean] geometry correspond to the real world?” Geometry is part of—and necessary to—our perception of the world, and is in that way safe from refutation.

So when Ernst Mach tries to excise metaphysics from physics, one of the things he takes aim at is this notion of space and time. He draws heavily on that Galilean notion about the invariance of the laws of physics under constant motion. Movement, he stresses, is movement relative to some other designated thing. We can measure distance without making claims about space; our measurements are perceptions. Should we even have this metaphysical notion of “space” that Kant insists we cannot do without?

Einstein’s first 1905 presentation of his theory of relativity draws on Mach’s approach. We can loosen our notions of space and time by fixing them to specific measurements, instead of treating them globally. The resulting flexibility can then be used to accommodate this difficult fact about the invariance of the speed of light, relative to observers.

However, note that this new, altered way of reckoning with space and time was then re-globalized, by Einstein’s former teacher Hermann Minkowski. We don’t want any more of that kind of “0 equals 1” problem that I outlined above, so we want there to actually be a global system in which all of these changes are consistent with each other; Minkowski showed that there is one. Space and time are folded together into a new notion of spacetime. Just as we can change our spatial co-ordinates by moving the zero point, or rotating our angle of view, we can change our spacetime co-ordinates depending on how fast we are moving, and in what direction. It’s still deeply weird, but at least we have that globally consistent perspective to fall back on; we’re not just floating in a sea of measurements and hoping it all works out. So we haven’t necessarily moved to a purely measurement-based approach. This level of theory is still consistent with Mach’s philosophy, but it doesn’t force us to adopt it.

On the other hand, even if we don’t have to adopt Mach’s worldview, things are looking kind of bad for Kant. Time and space do not seem to be certain and unchangeable in the way that “synthetic a priori” knowledge ought to be—and the situation is about to get worse.

Minkowski spacetime could make sense of relativistic mechanics, but it left one aspect of Newton’s old physics wide open for reinvention. In relativistic mechanics, anything that requires instantaneous changes across large distances no longer makes sense, because the very idea of something being instantaneous is now relative to our chosen co-ordinates; we don’t have a universal global time. But Newtonian gravity is instantaneous, as originally formulated. A mass moves, and its gravitational field moves with it, all at exactly the same time, across the entirety of space.

Einstein spent several years formulating his own theory of gravity that could fix this issue. The version he eventually found draws on yet another symmetry observation from Galileo. Remember, above, I mentioned that the motion of a pendulum doesn’t depend on its mass, and that this is a special case of a broader fact about gravity: things would all fall at the same speed, if it wasn’t for the effects of air resistance.

This is genuinely peculiar. A more massive object with the same electric charge on it will move more slowly than a less massive object would, when influenced by the same electric field. But with gravity, this can’t happen. The gravitational equivalent of the electric charge, in this analogy, is the object’s mass. Massive objects are harder to pull, but gravity pulls harder on massive objects! The two effects always cancel out exactly.

Einstein put this observation together with another symmetry observation of his own: acceleration and gravity are remarkably similar in their effects. You might notice this, if you’re in a lift that is accelerating particularly fast up or down. If the floor is accelerating upward, you will feel as if you are being pushed downward into the floor by a stronger gravitational force. If the floor accelerates downward, it can make you feel momentarily near-weightless; your stomach might lurch in response.

To be in free-fall is locally indistinguishable from experiencing no gravity at all. The acceleration due to gravity precisely cancels out the acceleration-like effects that gravity would otherwise have. This, in fact, is the true reason why astronauts in orbit around the Earth seem to be floating in zero gravity. It’s not that they have escaped the Earth’s gravitational field; on the contrary, that field is the thing keeping them in orbit! But the way an orbit works is by travelling fast enough to move past the Earth in the time it would have taken to fall down into it. An orbit is a kind of free-fall, falling around instead of down.

Free-fall is locally indistinguishable from being motionless—or travelling in a straight line—in the absence of a gravitational field. So Einstein’s theory of gravitation proposes that free-fall actually is motion in the local version of a straight line. It’s just that the “straight line” is on a surface that is curved. The presence of a massive object causes a curvature in spacetime that affects the way things move. We see these changes in motion, and call them gravity.

From here, we can give an explanation for why objects of different mass are affected by gravity in the exact same way. They are travelling in “straight lines” over the same curvature in spacetime. The invariance that Galileo saw, all those years ago, finally has a reason behind it.

V. Motion

It’s worth pausing, here, to admire the longevity and flexibility of Galileo’s style of describing physical motion. Newton is justly admired for forming a precise mathematical system that could describe celestial and terrestrial mechanics in a unified whole. But when it came time to re-think that system, it was Galileo’s symmetry observations that formed the backbone around which the new system could be arranged.

In an earlier post, I criticized Iris Murdoch for suggesting that Aristotle might be considered the “Shakespeare of science.” suggested in response that perhaps the idea of a “Shakespeare” in science does not quite make sense; that science is less about individual thinkers and more about the knowledge created by many, over time. This is a very sensible way of looking at it. Also—hear me out—the Shakespeare of science is Galileo.

Galileo is a thinker on the cusp of modernity, making elegant, perceptive observations of the world around him in ways that can fit into many different future systems. His work is picked up by later thinkers in ways that leave the original inspiration visible even as they allow for further creativity. Galileo also represents something important about how scientists think of themselves. His anti-Aristotelianism, which is aimed chiefly at those who follow Aristotle too rigidly rather than at Aristotle himself, is the original example of a specific style of rejecting tradition that scientists continue to revere.

Francis Bacon is often referenced, when thinkers in the humanities try to characterise the ethos of science. Galileo, somehow, is not. But scientists almost never talk about Francis Bacon (whose actual scientific work was much less prominent). We do talk about Galileo. Most of us don’t read Galileo, but he is quite readable. You could put The Assayer or Two New Sciences or that all-important Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems into a humanities-style reading course and he’d fit right in. Galileo should be one of the people you think of, if you’re wondering why we don’t all follow Aristotle any more. We should care about the details of how that change happened, instead of just shrugging and making a quick remark about “science” as if it were unnecessary for any non-specialist to examine the subject further.

Aristotle’s claim that moving objects naturally return to a state of rest—an absolute state of rest—is central to his understanding of the cosmos and indeed to some very important aspects of Aristotle’s metaphysics. You see, Aristotle also observes that, notwithstanding this (supposed) tendency for objects to cease moving when not pushed, the stars and planets nevertheless continue to move, steadily, day after day. He concludes that they each aspire to imitate the perfection of an immaterial, unchanging, “unmoved mover,” and that they therefore move in circles because a circle is the most perfect of shapes. In turn, those stars and planets then influence life here on Earth.

For Christians influenced by Aristotle, it seemed natural to equate the outermost unmoved mover—Aristotle’s “first cause” or “prime mover”—with God. But the concept of inertia changes all of that. The planets no longer need anything to inspire them to keep moving. They keep going unless something stops them. God ceases to be seen as constantly giving new motion to a universe that would otherwise always be slowing down. Instead, we get the Enlightenment clock-maker God, who created a world that could manage itself.

Among other things, I think this change sort of heightens the Problem of Evil. Instead of a God who breathes new goodness and motion constantly into a world that naturally resists this force, we have a God who is responsible for having calculated every last detail. Asking God to reverse an evil is no longer asking God to make God’s presence felt where God seemed to be absent. Instead, it becomes more like asking a God whose will is everywhere to change that will. It’s a totally different perspective.

For those who might hope that modern physics provides an opportunity to repudiate the Enlightenment and return to something more Aristotelian, I can offer no encouragement. Recall that this change in how we conceive of God is a consequence of the notion of inertia—on the idea that motion in a straight line, and the state of being at rest, are equally inclined to continue indefinitely. This equivalence between straight line motion and being at rest is the “principle of relativity” in Einstein’s first relativity paper. It’s still here. It’s still central.

VI. Reality

We call that first 1905 theory “special relativity” because it is a special case of Einstein’s theory of gravity—which we now call “general relativity.” So here’s an important question. Is general relativity a physical theory, or a metaphysical theory? Or could it be both?

As a physical theory, it certainly makes measurable predictions. These include a correction to the predicted orbit of Mercury (thereby solving an existing mystery as to why Newton’s theory wasn’t quite getting Mercury right), precise predictions for how gravitational forces ought to affect light (famously measured by Arthur Eddington), small distortions in time due merely to remaining stationary with respect to existing gravity (relevant to making precise GPS measurements) and plenty more.

On the other hand, general relativity makes substantial claims about the very nature of space. Spacetime, in general relativity, ceases to be an empty background and becomes something that can change over time. In fact, spacetime can be changing, all by itself, even if there are no objects in it! Einstein’s theory allows for the possibility of gravitational waves, transmitting energy across long distances via a moving distortion in spacetime. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for detecting them experimentally.

Kant’s Euclidean space couldn’t do anything like this: it was incapable of any kind of curvature, and it was an internally-constructed background for our perceptions of material objects; it couldn’t possibly do things on its own! So, just as inertia had metaphysical implications because of what it said about Aristotle’s wider system, general relativity has metaphysical implications because of what it says about Kant’s wider system. Kant claims that his deductions are reliable. He goes so far as to say that his theory stands or falls as a whole; he clearly means it when he says that there could never be a refutation of even the smallest part of it.

Yet, refutations we have. Lots of them, all over the place. Honestly, reading the Prolegomena, I started to feel a bit sorry for him. Kant remarks that we cannot expect to know why rigid objects can’t occupy the same space. I read that, thinking, it’s because of the Pauli exclusion principle. Kant says that we can’t know if the universe had a beginning. I read that, thinking, yeah, it’s technically true that we don’t know that, but the cosmic microwave background sure is suggestive.

Kant thinks he knows where the physics ends and the metaphysics begins. In fairness, Newtonian physics was taken by a lot of people to be basically certain. You can find plenty of philosophers wondering how to account for its certainty, prior to the point where we learned that we shouldn’t have been certain at all! Kant is not alone in his overconfidence.

I actually want to give Kant some credit. Look at this, in §40:

Pure mathematics and pure science of nature had no occasion for such a deduction, as we have made of both, for their own safety and certainty. For the former rests upon its own evidence; and the latter (though sprung from pure sources of the understanding) upon experience and its thorough confirmation. Physics cannot altogether refuse and dispense with the testimony of the latter; because with all its certainty, it can never, as philosophy, rival mathematics. Both sciences therefore stood in need of this inquiry, not for themselves, but for the sake of another science, metaphysics.

All this deduction about mathematics and physics is proving the obvious, says Kant. There’s no reason to care about it, except as an exercise prior to the actually controversial metaphysics. He’s wrong, though, about there being no reason to care. The applicability of geometry isn’t trivial at all, and Kant’s capacity to see that there is substance here is, in itself, worthy of admiration. Kant is a fish who has taught himself to see water.

If Kant had not articulated this, would Mach even have been able to see and reject it? Would we have had the philosophical grounding that we needed, in order to take our understanding of space and time apart—and then put them back together in a new shape?

“Synthetic a priori” is not Kant’s only definition of metaphysics. Later in the Prolegomena, he gives a lovely mathematical analogy. Physics, he says, is like the interior of a shape. Some metaphysical ideas are kind of like its boundary9: not part of the shape, but suggested by it.

The thing about asserting that metaphysics can be completely reliable, and then locating metaphysics on the boundary of your physics, is that this means you are assuming that the physics is going to stay put, yeah? Oh, sure, some of the interior stuff might change, but the basic shape had better be permanently fixed.

Only it’s not.

Kant is right that there is a human process of perception that naturally locates things in an internal notion of space and time. However, the theory of general relativity suggests that there is also something about space and time that is not just about our perception, and that indeed is not obliged to conform to the shape that our perception naturally gives it! There is something about space and time that is real. That’s why they have the power to surprise us—to be, dare I say it, inconvenient.

Part of what we mean by saying that something is real is that it has limitations, that we can’t just make it into whatever we want it to be. This is important for understanding physics as a practice.

I would not try to claim with certainty that general relativity is absolutely true. Perhaps it, too will undergo some future, fascinating, metaphysical reinvention that will change how we understand space and time, all over again. One of the remarkable things about general relativity is that in most cases it gives results that are almost the same as Newtonian gravity, even though it operates on a totally different metaphysical basis10. Surely, then, we are forced to conclude that there might be other possible theories that would give equally good results, could we but find and describe them. Einstein would say that, in that case, we ought to make sure to pick the beautiful ones.

Yet even if there is an element of human creativity in our physical theories, that creativity is operating within stringent limits. We cannot just do whatever we like, not if we want to conform to experimental evidence. It is the very difficulties that physics can give us, in attempting to make sense of it all, that indicate that limiting reality, however hard it may be to truly discern.

Moreover, even a partial truth on an unknown metaphysics can be powerful and brilliant. Think, again, about Galileo’s observation of the invariance of the period of a pendulum with respect to its amplitude. The pendulum—based on our current best understanding—is moving due to the curvature of spacetime, but Galileo knew nothing of that. Subsequent horological work swiftly showed that the invariance in question is only approximate even at the best of times. There’s nothing fundamental about it. Also, we built our clocks around it for hundreds of years and they worked.

I still think Kant is right that science and mathematics are the things that border on the easy metaphysics, comparatively speaking, even when that metaphysics turns out to be very hard indeed. Society and politics and human purpose are harder. There might not be any absolute truths involved; it’s hard to be sure. And yet I think it is still right to wonder about the geometry of those harder subjects, the invariances that their relativities might bend around, whether they are absolute truth or merely a local symmetry. I can’t stop looking, even when there are some things I can only measure with the unreliable beat of my own heart.

As I write this, it is past 11pm on the 6th of January. That means it is still, barely, the feast of the Epiphany, when the wise men who studied the stars followed their observations and, we are told, arrived into the presence of a newborn baby that was and is the answer to everything.

I do not have the answer to everything. My perfect timing will be gone by the time I can edit this and double-check my facts. The stars are no longer held by those who study them most deeply to be portents of human affairs. The calendar is political and Eastern Christians say that it won’t be Epiphany for a while yet. Quakers believe that all time is sacred, not just feast days. Enlightenment thinking holds that time is even and empty. Einstein tells us that time is part of spacetime, and it does indeed bend around the sun, but not in any of the ways we previously thought.

I love it all. Thanks for reading. Happy New Year.

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If it took too long, he’d plead for me to stop; sometimes he sounded genuinely distressed. But the more dangerous it felt, the more he loved it. He would enthusiastically exclaim “Stuck, stuck!” in a childish lisp, asking for another round. The whole thing made my son so deliriously happy that I am not sure I will ever succeed quite so thoroughly as a parent in such a short period, or with so little effort.

It paid off, too. A couple of months later, my son’s shoe buckle got stuck on a swing. In his panic, he looked likely to fall head first with his foot still anchored above. I instinctively called out “Oh no, you’re stuck!” and he calmed down immediately.

had a thoughtful post on Nietzsche, a while back, in which (among other things) he sounds a word of caution about the maxim “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” It’s not true in any absolute sense, and yet the aphorism persists because it conveys such a compelling mindset of growth through pain and risk.

I’m not as big of a thrill-seeker as my son, who loves rollercoasters and has a distressing tendency to regard all forms of parental disapproval as exciting dangers to be repeatedly invoked for the fun of it. Still, as a child I had my own feats of daring. My mother despaired over my habit as a baby of getting bored, climbing out of my cot, and wailing in distress after falling to the ground on the other side. She thought the pain ought to teach me not to do this. It did not.

I grew up to be a tree climber. I measured my growth by my ability to climb each of the trees in our yard. Every tree was its own rite of passage, a new lonely realm of awe and conquest. The ground was a threat below me, branches were challenges, and the sunlight through the leaves was an unreachable beauty beyond all grasping.

This brings me to my erstwhile existentialist practice of letting go of frameworks just to see if I can. I made a habit of returning to the risk of being free. Iris Murdoch thinks people like me are simply unwell:

Extreme Angst, in the popular modern form, is a disease or addiction … Those who are, or who attempt to be, exhilarated by Angst, that is by the mere impotence of the will and its lack of connection with the personality, are, as I have suggested above, in danger of falling into fatalism or sheer irresponsibility.1

Murdoch has her reasons for thinking this way, and I agree with one of them. People have personalities, and only a very silly and extreme existentialism would feign otherwise. Still, I admit, I sometimes do find Angst exhilarating. It’s not the only reason I’ve returned to the void so many times, and it’s certainly not the main reason, but it’s there.

Given my philosophical tendencies, I’ve actually read surprisingly little Nietzsche. When I did pick him up, though, I went straight for Beyond Good and Evil. I wanted context for the quote:

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

Joke’s on me; it’s an isolated aphorism.

I’ve always wondered, a little bit, about those monsters. I never saw any. Perhaps I am just comparatively unencumbered by demons, but I think that if you find monsters in the abyss, you probably brought them in with you, and you probably shouldn’t fight them. Nietzsche would scorn me for saying it, but when I fall into the abyss I win by losing. I remember why I came in, I submit to what compels me and I’m free of what doesn’t.

It was interesting to arrive at Nietzsche as an already-experienced abyssal navigator. Having boasted that he might narrate the world as consisting only of “the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of the claims of power,” Nietzsche remarks in Chapter 1 of Beyond Good and Evil that: “Granted that this also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better.” But I don’t think he really expects a reader with a pre-existing, resilient alternate response to the kinds of moves he is making.

I think that remark is supposed to make you feel smart, so that you’ll be more likely to let the later pages to get under your guard. It’s like when scammers praise people for asking if this is a scam, and then continue as if they’ve given a credible answer. By Chapter 9 he’s going on and on about how one quality is a sign of being particularly noble, and another quality is a sign of being particularly weak, and he clearly wants you to see something meaningful in these statements, but—of course—it’s just an interpretation, and not an especially compelling one.

Nietzsche is masculine to the point of parody, and not just with regard to the risk-taking that leads him to stare into the abyss. All of his responses to that fear are masculine, too. He builds his structures on daring, on hierarchy, on the sneering challenge of a dominance ritual. As a woman, it feels natural to respond with a shrug. Risk-taking has its charms, and the bragging rights can be fun, but I’m not really vulnerable to that kind of insinuation that I have something to prove.

It can be useful to practice facing a danger. Arguably, that’s part of what Nietzsche is getting at. It’s just that, when it comes to the existential abyss, one of the most useful things about experience with that particular danger is the ability, where appropriate, to resist the likes of Nietzsche. “Oh no, you’re falling!” You don’t say.

Not all philosophical danger takes place on a personal level, however. My own existentialism is vulnerable to the accusation that it is merely the philosophy of a specific individual, and that it therefore does not in itself give any answer to the question of how a society might answer deep questions together. One might plausibly claim that morality ought to have a social component, and thus that finding personal reasons to act is necessarily an incomplete ethical framework.

It’s a fair complaint, and it intersects with a broader fear that solving this problem for yourself might still not solve it for society. Nietzsche, certainly, is trying to address societal questions as much as personal ones. Without pretending to have a full answer to the fear of a Godless society, I will say that a workable response to that fear ought also to involve the free embrace of risk, to some extent.

A few months after I started dating the man who is now my husband, I wrote him a sonnet. It was about tree climbing. More specifically, it was about our relationship as a tree that we were climbing: beautiful, ever-growing, and sometimes vertigo-inducing. Loving someone is one of the riskiest things you can do, so perhaps it’s not surprising that I found myself reaching for those early lessons in solitary courage, repurposed for a joint exploration of something that was swiftly becoming too big to comprehend.

Society is always a jointly-embraced risk. We can try to shape it towards better ends, but it will always be beyond our control to some extent. If you believe in God, you can comfort yourself that somebody is in charge. If you don’t, you’d be a fool to think that you or anyone has the power to take the place in society that an all-powerful God occupies. Better, I think, to embrace a Taoist-style acceptance that much of what is important will always be trickling along, out of sight and out of our control. The courage to face existential freedom can be echoed in the courage to face the fact that everyone else has freedom, too.

There’s a kind of theistic belief that almost looks like immaturity, a yearning for the universe to take us into her arms and tell us that she loves us and that it was all a game. But every risk that has been taken under the hope of that embrace has been a real risk, honourable as such, and many of those risks strike me as worthwhile, whether you believe or not. So why wouldn’t I take them? What is existential freedom worth, if not the ability to risk myself for love, or for the truth, or for the hope of a better world?

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Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writing, in the manner of a novelist, often contains subtle allusions. Modern academics tend to explain their implications directly, and are so profuse with references that they will frequently include things they haven’t even read. Murdoch, by contrast, will do things like this:

It is totally misleading to speak, for instance, of ‘two cultures’, one literary-humane and the other scientific, as if these were of equal status. There is only one culture, of which science, so interesting and so dangerous, is an important part. But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words. This is why it is and always will be more important to know about Shakespeare than to know about any scientist: and if there is a ‘Shakespeare of science’ his name is Aristotle.

The above quote comes from The Idea of Perfection, an essay (adapted from a 1962 address) whose very title is a subtle allusion, in this case to Descartes—who is mentioned only briefly, and not in the part of the essay that invokes the crucial title concept.

At the time, the “two cultures” reference might well have been transparent, referring as it did to a recent and loud controversy between the sciences and the humanities. But these days, I suspect many readers would be unaware of C. P. Snow’s 1959 address in which he laments the lack of understanding between the “two cultures” of scientists, on the one hand, and literary intellectuals, on the other. One of the most frequently quoted parts of his address is this shot across the bow:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional [literary] culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

I trust the relevance to Murdoch’s statement is obvious! I am almost inclined to view Murdoch’s lack of direct referencing as akin to a deliberate snub, a sort of “We all know who I’m talking about but I won’t dignify him with a direct mention.” Snow’s address was not popular with the literary intellectuals of the time, not least because it began with high-minded language about bridging the gap between two cultures of equal worth, but in its practical recommendations mostly took the part of science against the humanities in a variety of ways.

Unlike Murdoch, I would not cast Aristotle in the role of the “Shakespeare of science.” I mean no disrespect to Aristotle’s important role in the history of natural philosophy, but I dislike the implications of Murdoch’s comment. “So the great edifice of modern physics goes up,” Snow laments, “and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.” Murdoch’s rejoinder would seem to imply that such a lack of insight would be unimportant, provided that such people understand Aristotle. This is a breathtaking dismissal of the dramatic changes wrought upon our worldview and our understanding of truth over the past several hundred years by the transition of our natural philosophy into what we now think of as “science.”

Murdoch’s initial response to Snow is defensive, and takes a tone of putting science in its place, but I think the subject must have remained on her mind. How does scientific understanding affect our broader worldview? Is it necessary to analyse the perspective of science when constructing a way of understanding, say, ethics?

C. P. Snow certainly holds that science has something to say about morality, because in a 1960 address, entitled The Moral Un-Neutrality of Science, he declares that both the beauty of science and the centrality of truth-seeking to science give the subject an inevitable moral component. Murdoch is Platonist enough that she might agree about the relevance of natural and conceptual beauty to ethics. She also, quite clearly, continued to think about the relationship between seeing truly and acting virtuously. In The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts (1967), she writes:

Of course virtue is good habit and dutiful action. But the background condition of such habit and such action, in human beings, is a just mode of action and a good quality of consciousness. It is a task to come to see the world as it is.

Although Murdoch refuses to ascribe any primacy to science over the arts in this task of truth-seeking, she nevertheless holds that science may be relevant, writing:

Honesty seems much the same virtue in a chemist as in a historian, and the evolution of the two could be similar. And there is another similarity between the honesty required to tear up one’s theory and the honesty required to perceive the real state of one’s marriage, though doubtless the latter is much more difficult.

Is Murdoch still thinking about Snow, with this remark? I think she is. For one thing, back when Snow was a scientist, he was in fact a chemist!

Thus far I am quite sure of my conclusions, but I cannot resist an additional stretch. In Snow’s novel The Search, published in 1934 after he gave up science to be a writer, a scientist falsifies a result for professional gain. Less than a year after The Search was published, Dorothy L. Sayers included Snow’s novel as a plot point in her own detective novel Gaudy Night. Sayers, in her usage of The Search, makes this same equivalence between honesty in chemistry and honesty in history. It is in Gaudy Night, in the context of history, that we are told of a crucial character who once failed to tear up his own theory when presented with a countervailing fact.

It is entirely plausible that Murdoch the philosopher-novelist would follow Snow into his—and others’—fiction writing in order to properly consider his argument that science has close links to our moral development. She resists Snow’s suggestion that scientific understanding might be necessary to fully comprehend this link, and I shall not attempt to adjudicate that point of contention. What is far more interesting to me is the way that Murdoch and Snow agree on the importance of seeking to see truly, as practised in science but not exclusively in science. If anything, Murdoch does a much better job of conveying this moral importance than Snow does!

In The Two Cultures and in The Moral Un-Neutrality of Science, Snow appears to be tapping into a philosophical intuition that he cannot fully articulate. Stephen Jay Gould, in The Hedgehog, The Fox and The Magister’s Pox, recalls that he followed the “two cultures” controversy with eagerness as an undergraduate. However, he continues, “[M]y rereading of it, as I prepared to write this book, left me with a feeling of disappointment and much ado about nothing.” Likewise, in A View from the Bridge: The Two Cultures Debate, Its Legacy, and the History of Science, historian of science D. Graham Burnett credits an encounter with The Two Cultures as a sixteen-year-old for influencing his choice of field, and yet notes that, when re-reading it as a graduate student, he found “a new distaste for the essay.”

When I was a young, ardent student of the physical sciences, I had this same experience of seeing something in The Two Cultures—and I, too, failed to find it, when I went back to the essay years later and tried to put my finger on it. Unlike Gould and Burnett, however, I am reluctant to conclude that the address was empty all along. There’s something there, almost, before Snow leaves the abstract theorizing behind and turns to public policy.

In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch fleshes out her indication about the importance and difficulty of trying to see truly by giving a virtue-ethical nod to the role a science or craft—a τέχνη, to use the Greek word that Murdoch borrows from Plato—can play in developing a person’s character. Her approach is echoed by Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian perspective in After Virtue, which gives a central role to practices which inculcate virtue and are directed towards a shared good.

Snow’s novel The Search depicts chemistry as a practice/τέχνη in this sense. The book refers, early on, to the narrator’s “first glimpse of scientific unselfishness,” when the staff of an institution where he does not even work take the time to diligently teach him about crystallographic methods. Scientists, in this story, share a goal of truth-seeking, and some will gladly share both expertise and equipment as a result. The scientific community of The Search also has its bad apples, of course. Still, science as a whole is portrayed as a community with a central moral vision from which co-operation naturally proceeds.

As a result, the moment when the narrator of The Search knows that he is no longer a scientist, can never go back to being a scientist, is the moment when he gives up on this moral vision. When he chooses not to expose his friend’s deliberate publication of a scientific falsehood, he is “breaking irrevocably from science.”

Science has provided us with new standards of rigour in truth-seeking, for example by reducing the weight that we place on tradition and popular wisdom, and by raising the salience of corroboration between different techniques, or different observers, in order to measure reliability. Those changes in the way we perceive truth have an impact on how we understand the virtue of honesty. To be honest—either with oneself or with others—is to faithfully seek and acknowledge ones own best judgment as to the truth: about science, or about history, or indeed about interpersonal relationships, as Murdoch notes.

It is rightly noted by many that science has limitations. Sometimes, indeed, the notion that science could justly affect our moral and spiritual lives is dismissed as “scientism” as soon as it has been raised. Stephen Jay Gould famously described religion and science as operating in “non-overlapping magisteria.” But Murdoch’s holistic Platonism does not allow for such a clean separation. Instead, we see that while science is reliant on a moral vision, it is necessarily also a contributor to that moral vision, because it is a practice within which we learn virtues that can apply in other contexts.

I am sincerely impressed by Iris Murdoch’s ability to take a claim to which she was initially hostile, look at it in depth, and provide it with a substantiation that takes it far beyond its initial expression. Snow himself, though he shares much of Murdoch’s cultural background and with it some classical tendencies, cannot ground the instincts he is gesturing at in a deeper worldview. Murdoch can.

Moreover, I do not think that this connection that Murdoch has noted between science and virtue ethics can be ignored by other virtue ethicists. The concealed depths in Murdoch’s way of including science stand in stark contrast to a notable shallowness on the same subject in Alasdair MacIntyre’s work.

After Virtue dances around science in a variety of ways. The seventh chapter freely acknowledges that “The modern contrast between the sphere of morality on the one hand and the sphere of human sciences on the other is quite alien to Aristotelianism because, as we have already seen, the modern fact-value distinction is also alien to it.” Despite this, MacIntyre laments that the Aristotelian account of human action should have fallen out of favour at the same time as the Aristotelian understanding of nature (by way of the scientific revolution) and theology (by way of many currents in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation).

Given the holistic nature of Aristotelianism that MacIntyre already acknowledges, it is surely understandable that problems with this worldview in one area would be taken to pose problems in other areas. Of course, this does not prevent us from looking backward to earlier traditions when attempting to mend holes in our own, but it does suggest that some of the problems that Aristotelianism ran into may have been genuine, and in need of being addressed in some way.

This issue intensifies in MacIntyre’s follow up work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? By this time, MacIntyre has converted to Thomas Aquinas’ account of virtue ethics, and, with it, to Catholicism. As we have noted, MacIntyre’s worldview is holistic. There is no fact-value distinction; there are no non-overlapping magisteria. Yet MacIntyre’s historical narrative jumps straight from Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, to the Scottish Enlightenment, in the eighteenth1 century, rendering the scientific revolution suspiciously silent.

Whose Justice? makes much of the virtue of honesty, conspicuously noting which worldviews have an absolute prohibition against lying and which do not. Yet the book’s attitude to truth is far more ambiguous, declaring airily that “facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.” Does MacIntyre therefore propose to dispense with the concept of a fact? It would appear so. He substitutes, instead, an idea of “truth” as formulated within an intellectual tradition.

I suspect sophistry. Science is an intellectual tradition, albeit one that we have been struggling for centuries to fit into a broader and more holistic understanding. MacIntyre may flirt with the idea that it was a false step, but I remain convinced of its truth-seeking utility.

Moreover, when it comes to the virtue of honesty, I place far greater importance on the integrity required to be honest with oneself than I do on whether it is acceptable to lie to Aunt Agatha about the aesthetic qualities of her ugly hat. To be sure, I dislike lies and have found that the attempt to be truthful even in minor matters can have unexpected benefits. But to be persnickety about honesty in small social matters even as one slurs over the truth in ones wider understanding is a real “straining the gnats while swallowing a camel” kind of move.

It can be an advantage or a disadvantage to make links between ethics and science. There is something very powerful in the way that Iris Murdoch incorporates a Platonic love of truth into her worldview, and integrates it with scientific truth-seeking even as she insists that science is but one part of our search for the true and the good. By contrast, when MacIntyre advocates for pre-Enlightenment holism, it is a real weakness when he tries to gloss over the subject of how we ought to see science in this context.

Snow and Murdoch together have furnished us with an insight that virtue ethicists ought not to ignore. Truth is important to morality, and the practice of science can give a moral education that affects how we see truth. Any historical story about why religion and ethics have developed in the way that they have will be incomplete if it does not take this influence into account. Philosophies that draw on the classical tradition can become less convincing if they do not adequately address science; on the other hand, they can also become more convincing when they handle science well.

By the way, I have written before on The Search and Gaudy Night, here:

The extremely difficult realisation

Existentialists and Mystics in the 21st century

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8 months ago · 2 likes · Mary Jane Eyre and Gemma Mason

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Thank you to everyone who has come this far with me. I knew, when I started writing these posts, that I was going to have to start my story from a fairly young age in order to fully explain to you why the later parts happened in the way that they did. But the act of writing it, and of being read, has also been a welcome source of context in understanding it for myself.

Calling back to the start, then, let me begin this final post by giving Descartes one significant concession. When Descartes says that the human mind is capable of encountering “the idea of perfection,” I might want to quibble with some of his reasoning, but in the end I am in no position to tell him he judged wrongly.

Ten-year-old me might actually kind of love this. Back then, I couldn’t see how to derive everything from thought in the way that Descartes tried to, but I really wanted it to be possible! I wanted truth, real truth, to be like maths, pure and perfect and insulated from the annoying imprecisions of empirical measurement.

Of course, it’s not actually that simple. Descartes wrote, after that first “I think, therefore I am,” that “I judged that I might take it as a general rule that the things that we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true, and that the only difficulty lies in the way of discerning which those things are that we conceive distinctly.” Yet it is a central moral of my story that the things we conceive of with the mind are far more shifting and strange than exterior empirical reality. Even the self is ambiguous, never mind anything else!

I don’t think I will ever quite be over the disorientation of having my self-perception rearrange itself so fundamentally in such a short time. I’m sure there is a perspective from which I merely woke up to the obvious, but to me, accustomed to living with darkness, it is an almost nauseating vertigo to instead be surrounded by dizzying colour.

I’m a mystic. I see patterns everywhere, and even when I can’t confirm them they’re harder to dismiss. I’ve also had one distinct vision (while thinking about how not to have them, just for extra irony). There’s a specific way of folding an origami octahedron where the construction reminds me of how my perception came together, and by now I’ve played with it in so many ways that it’s turning into an art project (see above, for example). I’ve mostly avoided getting drunk but I suspect that if I did there’s a small chance I might stare at God—so to speak—in the same way that drunk people are more likely to make inadvisable passes at improbably attractive people. Oh, and the skin keeps flaking off my eyelids, which might be unrelated but it seems thematic1. I’m not sure it’s healthy for a person to be holding this much meaning at once.

I should definitely read more Christian existentialists. As I noted in a comment below one of my posts, I have read only a little of Kierkegaard but he deserves more of my attention. Likewise, I’ve only begun to scratch the surface with Simone Weil. I have read Pascal’s Pensées in their entirety, and I loved the early sections. I have not read Augustine, though I get the impression that he probably counts as part of this tradition, retroactively.

As with atheist existentialism, I am learning a great deal about how this works just by running naturally into the relevant ideas. It is terrifying to face the possibility that everything matters. It is even more terrifying if you do it cold, with no surrounding structure of understanding or reassurance.

It helps to have other people with me. I’ve been attending my local Quaker meeting for about three years, now. I’ve learned a lot from Quaker tradition already, but I still keep that promise about not diverting responsibility to my worldview. I know I can get things wrong, and I fear it. Everything matters so much. I don’t quite know how to handle that, especially since I’m still not sure of it. I lived in a hammock above the abyss for twenty-five years! I’d like to say “God help me,” but I have trouble with all three of the words in that sentence.

It’s tempting to flinch, and there are so many ways of flinching. Here’s one. Taking it as understood that I want to continue reaching for a spiritual reality outside of myself, I might try for the following nuanced version of Pascal’s Wager: life is so much more worth living when I keep the idea of a spiritual truth accessible to my mind that I lose nothing by supposing it to be true, even if I can’t show it by reason. Does the real truth even matter?

The problem with thinking this way, and the reason I refer to this as “flinching,” is that truth, itself, in the sense of an external reality that we don’t get to choose, is one of the most potent things “outside ourself” that we can reach for. I actually don’t think Pascal would have experienced his life-changing “Night of Fire” if he hadn’t been the kind of scientist who would actively seek empirical evidence and change his mind on that basis. I understand completely why a person with an experience of something like God might hold that so precious that it would seem worth any risk to keep it, but I think I have to be willing to risk even that. I think I have to be willing to risk everything.

Related problems can arise from a pragmatic approach in which we try to deal with our lack of certainty by confining ourselves to describing things as best we can within a given understanding. Depending on how we conceive of it, this approach also risks failing to reach outside. We don’t always understand our knowledge. To accept that our knowledge has limits is wise; to restrict ourselves to what we think those limits are is too much of a confinement.

When I sight-sing, do I know where the notes are? I think most people would agree that do, if I have just done a calculation like “This note is a C, the next note is an F, the distance is a fourth and Love Me Tender starts like this.” But what about quick, chromatic phrases where the intervals are weird and so is the position of the notes within the key? I do those by playing the phrase on an imaginary piano. My hand has to actually move, or it won’t work; even then, I’m rarely sure as I sing that I have it right. Does my hand know things that my mind does not?

“Where are the notes in this phrase?” is in this case a liminal question, somewhere in between “knowing how” and “knowing that.” It seems to be a place where definitions break down. I don’t think that is a problem with our definitions that we need to patch. I think it’s more like one of those cracks where the light gets in. We can know things without knowing either how or that we know them.

Naturally, such knowledge is tricky to handle. Far from thinking that all religions are true, I think it makes more sense to start from the idea that all religions contain falsity. If there really is some underlying truth that they are all aiming at, despite their differences, then it follows inexorably that we must be bad at understanding it. This also means I probably understand even less than I think I do, which means that I understand hardly anything at all. Yet I do not feel that I can, with integrity, respond to my lack of individual certainty by assuming the comparative reliability of some particular body of doctrine2. Even a whole society working on this problem for thousands of years might not get very far.

What is the difference between a universe without meaning and a universe whose meaning is beyond our understanding?

If there is no meaning, are we free to create our own? If I think that a longstanding interaction with my sibling is a friendly joke, and my sibling hears it as a continually reiterated insult, it would be absurd to insist on the freedom to define the meaning of my own words. No, the meaning that I thought I saw was predicated on certain beliefs that turn out not to be true. I am free to insist on my own meaning, but only if I am willing to sacrifice any right to meanings that draw upon fact. Only in pure fantasy can meanings be limited to my own projections, and even there some multiplicity of self is liable to complicate things.

Even an atheist existentialism, then, finds itself limited in its meanings. To be free to create meaning is, in a sense, merely to be free to impute meaning, in a manner that may, like scientific truth, be contradicted in future. Or perhaps we might say that meaning is an interplay between creativity and perception, writing our own words into the sonnet form of the universe.

Now, what if the meaning of the universe is too large to understand? Then meanings can be absolutely true, and perceived indeed—but imperfectly. To render them comprehensible is virtually indistinguishable from an act of creation, a work of art that draws on the Source, rendering it graspable at the price of limitation or imperfection or, usually, both.

Somewhere out in that far arc where my understanding reaches its limit and yet keeps reaching, the act of creation merges with the act of perception and I do not know which is which. In perfect agnosticism I submit, simultaneously, to cold reality and the hot desires of my heart, and everything makes sense and none of it is comprehensible.

Agnostic existentialism, in this sense, is almost impossible to perfectly achieve. In practice, it draws on atheistic existentialism or theistic existentialism or both. It has the power to be open to the world, and to other people, and to whatever good may be found, howsoever we find it. In exchange, it submits to not knowing with all the terror that implies.

I mentioned the theistic side of that existential terror in a group discussion after Quaker meeting, once. Casually, you know. It’s nice when you find that things matter, but it’s also scary that they matter, because it’s hard to know how it all fits together and what if you get it wrong? And Val looked at me, and she said, “Isn’t that what faith is for?”

So it is, I thought. I couldn’t have told you at the time what that meant, only that it was true, now that Val said it. But I could have told you that it mattered that it came from Val. It’s an odd fact among Quakers—probably true in most religions, actually—that you learn things from people, by word of mouth, with contexts that inform you about more than just the words. Val said it in an open sort of way, like a genuine query, though not one requiring a spoken answer. She said it as the person who answered my email when I wanted to check that I could come to my first Quaker meeting. She said it, and I thought, so it is.

Something about it feels familiar. I think it’s almost the same move as before, in this mirror world where everything matters. It is, fundamentally, a choice to accept existential fear without letting that fear become my primary reason. I can do that. I’ve been doing it since I was twelve.

You can dress it up; you can give yourself reasons for not fearing. Some of them might even be true, for all I know. But the essence of what I got, in that so it is, was really just this. Don’t build yourself on fear, not at the heart of you. Not where it matters.

Lying in bed, on the evening of that second day, there was a moment when I just laughed. I felt silly—I think I was laughing at myself, more than anything—but I didn’t care. I had no fixed theory of what was happening, but I knew I was going through something, and I had reached the point where I could accept that much, and let it happen.

So it might make sense that by day three I was ready to ask if the state I was in was going to lead me to a particular religion. Did I feel a sudden urge to proclaim that Jesus is Lord, or that there is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet? Perhaps more realistically, did I feel in my heart that I ought to acknowledge the existence of God?

It is only fair for me to admit that I braced myself before committing myself to the question; that I still feared something in it, perhaps just feared changing my mind. I looked, anyway.

What I found, at that point, was that the very last thing I wanted to do, with this, was name it. You have to let it be what it is. Force it into a frame, and you might lose it.

I also knew I’d never worship anything else, could never worship anything else, that there was a space in my heart that beat with this, this, this, only this. There was, in fact, nothing new about that. Religion is hard for me, yes, but only because I instinctively quail at speaking carelessly about this or anything related to it, and yet I can’t possibly follow any other thing instead.

Of course, I understood that this was suggestive, in itself. I did not necessarily believe in God, I realised, but I certainly believed in both blasphemy and idolatry. It was odd, watching those definitions shift in real time, pre-existing emotions taking on new labels. Did the world rotate, or did I only tilt my head?

If I had been Jewish, maybe I could have cobbled something together inside that set of traditions, between beliefs I now actually sort of had and practices that I might have been able to accept for the sake of history and community. I was not Jewish, however, and I did not quite feel I had a right to insert myself into that framework.

Christianity had too many details I couldn’t attest to. Islam had a view of prophecy that I now basically rejected. My lack of a viable spiritual framework gave an entirely different kind of groundlessness to my usual existential freedom. I had no language, no sense-making frameworks for anything like this. Even if I had, they might not have helped all that much.

The longer I remained in direct perception of whatever this was, the less I would be able to explain myself. I would come unmoored, unable to be coherent to anyone else, unable even to be coherent to myself. I had made my way here along a liminal space where reason meets art. If I lost all ability to reason, would I even be able to stay? Or would I just become purely and simply mad?

I did wonder if going mad might be the right choice, if I was lacking in moral spine by not making the attempt to remain. But I also knew that there were things I wanted, good things that I wouldn’t be able to do unless I kept my sanity—such as it was—intact. I wanted to be able to communicate between where I now was, and where I used to be. I wanted to still be able to connect with other people.

Whatever this is, it’s a connecting sort of thing. I felt far less socially awkward under its influence, and indeed this remained for some time afterward. Eventually I was able to articulate to myself that this is partly because a lot of my social awkwardness is kind of selfish. It’s often grounded in worry about what people will think about me. If I focus instead on other people and what would be nice for them, it disappears. I can use that articulation to regain some of what I had, but at the time it just happened, without thinking, without my even being able to say what had changed. It was nice.

I let the equilibrium slip, releasing my balance, and it was gone.

I wondered if I’d ever experience it again. I remembered that first existential fall, back when I was twelve, and how confidently I had assumed that someday, even if it took years, I would be ready to do it another time. I couldn’t do that here. I was scared! I’d just been through a lot. I didn’t even know what I was going to do with what I’d already seen, let alone whether I could handle something like that twice. How long would it take to be brave enough?

I felt like I’d just set aside the most interesting intellectual problem I’d ever seen, and I might never get as good a look at it ever again. I didn’t have enough time. I was going to die.

I had kept a certain equanimity about death, after that period of depression in my teens. Oh, I suspected more and more that I wouldn’t want to go when the time came, but I also knew that the finitude of life had got me through a tough spot. I valued life, but it was hard to resent death.

I can’t feel that way any more. I want to live. I want a thousand lifetimes.

If I got to choose, I think I would want it to be true that you get to keep your progress, somehow, and then you get reborn and you work on it a little more, and then when you comprehend it, sure, then you can die. Failing that, I would also accept being given the answers when I die and then getting to stay with this forevermore. If nothing else, I would like for there to be a heaven so that I can personally thank all the people who helped bring me this far, the ones I can name and the ones I can’t, everyone who ever did anything that mattered to the formation that brought me here. That would be lovely.

But I don’t believe in believing things just because they would be nice. I’m honestly quite fearful of accidentally misreporting my experience, and I’m horrified by the idea of falsely attesting to something I didn’t actually get from it. If this isn’t knowledge that I get to have then I’m not about to fake it.

So I have to accept that one life might be all I get. It hurts.

In the immediate aftermath, I went through a period of about a week when I was half-hallucinating at odd moments, feeling watched or finding myself attributing significance to minor things for no obvious reason. For the most part, I kept to the same instinct I’d had while in the spiritual experience: don’t elaborate, let things be what they are. I wondered if they were in fact just localised perceptions of a broader truth that everything matters. Whatever they were, they passed.

It is, I know, a deep gift to get to see something like that for a full clear day—plus some change on either side. I was grateful. I was also flummoxed. In some ways, I was almost frustrated. I had been fine! There was nothing wrong with my prior worldview, in the sense of being untenable relative to publicly available facts. I had long since ceased to find the existentialism especially difficult to personally handle. I still felt—I still do feel—that existentialist atheism is a reasonable worldview to personally hold. I just happen to be a mystic, now.

I am not actually complaining. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.

The thing is, though, I thought I wasn’t even spiritual. I mean, no shade upon the “spiritual but not religious,” but I never self-identified that way. I had a lifelong unshakeable desire for the good, and I thought I wasn’t spiritual. I developed a personal practice of descending into the dark to make decisions when I had nothing else to go on, and I thought I wasn’t spiritual. I was playing with ideas like “What if the whole world is a form, like the sonnet?” and—well, okay, at that point I might have admitted to doing something a little bit spiritual. But it was totally compatible with open-minded skeptical thinking, so I figured it was the shallow end and I was probably safe.

Apparently, spirituality that is totally compatible with open-minded skeptical thinking is actually the deep end. My bad!

I told Megan I had become religious, a while back. She happened to be in town when I had a night off—perfect timing—and we’d been sitting in the bar of her hotel, drinking whiskey.

She said, “I think I kind of share my spirituality with my students, when I’m teaching music. Does that count?”

Then she flinched a little, and my heart just about cracked in half. “Of course,” I said. “Of course it counts.”

What is wrong with us all, that the first thing a person expects from religious people is that we’re going to take whatever is most important and meaningful to you and just absolutely trash it?

Listen, you cannot hoard whatever this is. It’s not a product you can monopolise, touting your Real God, available every Sunday, accept no substitutes for the genuine name-brand version. The holistic view is large and difficult, but smaller fragments are easy enough to see if you know what you are looking for. I see them in people who think they are spiritual, and I see them in people who think they are not spiritual. I see them in the arts, and I see them in the sciences. I see them in stained glass windows, and I see them in shabby curtains. I see them in the messy way that the ocean reflects the light.

I don’t think I will attempt another existential drop for a while, if ever. But I am learning other spiritual practices. My local group of Quakers has been lovely. Worship is mostly silent, so I don’t have to worry about being asked to say something I’m not comfortable with. Being not entirely sure about using the word “God” is totally normal; some of us say it and some of us don’t and it’s fine.

It’s also completely normal, amongst Quakers, for the sense of the divine (or whatever you want to call it) to come and go. We accept it, either way. It is what it is. I am not afraid of losing it permanently. On the edge of sleep, or when I pray, every so often I catch a glimpse of that holistic idea, in ways that are easier to handle than looking at it directly. It comforts me. If I never get to see it again like I did, then at least I still have that much.

The next post in this series is here.

This is Part 7 of an existentialist memoir series. The first post is here.

By day two, as my initial confusion settled somewhat, I had conceded to myself that any person with a pre-existing belief in God would call this God. But I didn’t have a pre-existing belief in God. I was a lifelong atheist, and I was having an extended spiritual experience of a type that I had mostly discounted as even being possible. I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t on drugs. I hadn’t been meditating. There was the existentialism, of course, but—forgive me—I had always sort of thought that the weirder existentialists might have just had trouble holding their existential Angst. This was not a movement in the direction of less Angst.

Nor was I missing my critical faculties. I was, in fact, using what I would ordinarily think of as my critical faculties in order to be here in the first place, and there was no reason why I couldn’t keep using them. I was not sustaining this experience by belief. I could pose whatever questions I wanted.

Well, what would you have done, given that opportunity?

Faced with something that so clearly mattered, I treated it the same way I would treat anything else that was deeply important. I asked questions, making careful, fine distinctions. Here and now did not seem like the time to jump to conclusions. If this was, in some sense, evidence—albeit of a personal and subjective kind—then I should gather as much as possible, as carefully as possible.

So, yes, this might seem like God, but when people say “God” they mean a lot of different things at once, don’t they? What did I actually feel like I had evidence of, here? What was this? It was definitely intertwined with both morality and motives. Treating it like a Platonic Good came naturally to me, although I suspected (and indeed still suspect) that I was defaulting to a pre-existing comfortable concept by seeing it as such.

Despite the breadth of my description in Part 6, in the moment I did not find myself wanting to adopt a pantheistic perspective. Viewed as a moral concept, I supposed that there would be aspects of the world that would be more in accordance what I was seeing and aspects of the world that would be less in accordance with it.

Had it made the world? The world—famously—doesn’t seem like it was made by something that good, but theodicy is an age-old problem. How powerful was it? I couldn’t tell. Anywhere from omnipotent to powerless. How big was it? Really big. Possibly it could have made the world, I don’t know. Then again, jumping from “much bigger than what I think of as me” to “bigger than basically everything” was a bit of a leap. I am pretty small, in the scheme of things. There could be intermediate scales, if you see what I mean. How would I know the difference?

Could I conclude anything from it about whether there was any sort of life after death? Not by any immediate direct perception. Did it know everything? Did it “know” anything? I didn’t really feel inclined to personify it. Sticking with a vaguely Platonist perspective, I wanted to think of it as some sort of ideal, accessible by thinking, like mathematics. Except, normally you can’t have a mathematical concept in your head unless you already understand it, and I did not understand this! Still, I kind of felt like there was a sense in which it wouldn’t tell me anything unless I went and got it for myself, using my own knowledge as a help. I don’t think I could’ve used it to, say, predict the lottery or anything.

I felt, too, that I was in control of where I put my attention. You might say that it was, in some ways, like having the entirety of all moral truth laid out in front of me, except that I had to bring my own facts, and it wouldn’t correct me if I forgot to consider something relevant. You could make horrible mistakes, from here, if there was something that really mattered and you just forgot to look.

This, incidentally, answered my question of whether thinking this way would necessarily turn me into a self-righteous fanatic. The answer was in fact surprisingly simple. If you genuinely think you are following something outside of yourself—even if it’s associated with something that you formerly thought of as purely internal—then that raises the possibility that you could get it wrong, which permits the necessary caution. It was odd, to me, how impossible it had been to imagine that from the other side. Truly, you have to consider things properly before you can know what would follow from them!

But how was I supposed to hold on to any of this? It was all so big, so much larger than any religion could ever be. I couldn’t comprehend it myself, now, while experiencing it directly. When I stopped seeing it, when I eventually let go, would I be able to keep anything at all?

What if I tried to articulate just a small part of it? If I did, would that count as prophecy? That would be cool, you have to admit! Not that I was in a position to say whether it would be prophecy, mind you. Certainly, it would not be infallible. It would be a miracle, in fact, if someone were to articulate large parts of what I was experiencing without mistakes. I was inclined, despite the context, to disbelieve in such miracles; they might even be logically impossible. Verbal description of this would surely always be incomplete or imperfect; usually both.

Small parts of it, though, that might be possible. I am good at articulating things. Could I do it? I went to try, and found an unexpected difficulty.

I have, you might say, a kind of prearticulatory space in my head. I use it for all sorts of wording tasks. It’s great for summarising: read a long thing, turn it into something wordless, turn it back into fewer words. It can be good for mathematical conjectures, too, provided I remember that I’m not perfectly accurate with them, or indeed just for mathematical explanation, if people need me to explain something from several angles before it makes sense. Any time I have an idea in my head that doesn’t yet have a description, I can sit with it for a bit, and sort of pull out some words, and compare them with the idea.

I went to use my prearticulatory space.

It was occupied. Fully. Overflowing with this. There was no room for anything else. No room, for example, for me to make a wording, and compare it with a concept. If I had wanted to word even a small part of this thing, I would have had to make something else in my head that wasn’t this. I couldn’t do it.

I wondered, perhaps, if someone else could, though. Someone better at it than me. Maybe you could sort of squeeze the overflowing concept out of a tiny space, and—this would be the really hard part—keep that tiny space separate, so that you wouldn’t lose this by accidentally shifting it off the equilibrium, and then use the tiny separate space to make some words, so you could compare this with whatever wording you’d made?

That would be an absolutely gymnastic manoeuvre. I found myself wondering if this was what people meant by wrestling with an angel, or with God. Seriously, though, if Moses actually managed to get ten separate commandments out of this, then that was truly impressive. Any ten, honestly. They wouldn’t even need to be especially good ones, I’d still be impressed.

Is this actually a thing people did, thousands of years ago, in their own way?

It dawned on me suddenly that all of those people, back then, were people. Of course I knew that intellectually, but it was quite another thing to feel it with my whole heart. To think of some of them as contemplating their own versions of this same problem was to see them, and by extension every person around them—every person who ever lived—in vivid metaphorical colour, deeply foreign and amazingly, awe-inspiringly human.

I had to sit with that one for a bit.

When I returned to the articulation problem, it occurred to me that it might be possible to do an end-run around it. I couldn’t make words, but I could compare pre-existing words and see if they fit. I cast around for something likely and found consistent phrasing of my own, at hand. Specifically, “Regard people in depth and with sympathy.”

Having found—or perhaps stolen—that much, I didn’t push my luck in seeking anything further. I felt like I’d already done something pretty dangerous.

There are, of course, reasons why I haven’t talked about this part before. A person could definitely take this the wrong way, and since I wasn’t even sure, in the aftermath, how I wanted to take it, I figured I’d better shut up until after I’d had a good long think.

Of course I wondered whether I should be shouting my fragmentary wording from the rooftops. But I didn’t think so. Anyone inclined to believe it would probably not need the testimony of my own weird spiritual experience to take it seriously as an idea. It’s not like the ethos was new. Possibly, in fact, the best way to spread the idea would just be to act in accordance with it.

As the old Quaker saying has it, “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” Quakers, I have since learned, have quite a lot of ideas that might be relevant. They say, if you think you’ve heard something, you should ask who the message is for, and in what context. If I apply that angle, the answer is actually quite simple!

“Regard people in depth and with sympathy” is phrasing I came up with when was setting up a new Reddit forum. He asked me, early on, if I wanted to help moderate, writing, “I get the sense … that you intuitively know the sort of thing we're aiming for.” I thought so, too, and had in fact already offered to form that intuition into something a bit more concrete. So I sat with it for a bit and pulled out some words:

I might go for a phrasing like "the moderation on this [subreddit forum] believes that you should regard people in depth and with sympathy" -- both other posters, and people who are likely to be affected by any ideas you post. Not that people would have to agree with the subreddit's point of view in order to post, but they'd have be willing to put up with being moderated on that basis.

…

There might be better ways to phrase it. Moreover, as compared to your moderation style, it probably isn't the only principle you're going by.

Trace wrote back in less than an hour:

You've very efficiently gotten to the core of what I'm hoping for. I like your phrasing a lot, and, ah, I've already adopted it into the sidebar.

So, who is this message for, and in what context? The obvious answer would be that it’s for running a subreddit, and it’s not for being taken as prophecy, it’s for being taken as a moderation guideline. In fact, one reason why I didn’t talk about any of this earlier is that it was still being used as a moderation guideline, and I didn't think implying it to be the Word of God or whatever would actually help with that. But, as happens sometimes with insufficiently dramatic internet dynamics, the subreddit has slowed down considerably over time. I haven’t had to moderate many close calls there in a while.

Still, we had some pretty worthwhile conversations. That includes the one that precipitated me seeing this, so, hey.

In context, that phrasing may have already served its purpose. Knowing that, perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this to begin with. I wouldn’t want it to come across wrongly. I do think “Regard people in depth and with sympathy” is pretty good general advice, but as a description of this it’s basically like saying that a dodecahedron has at least one edge. It’s not that informative relative to the whole and it’s not even the first thing you’d notice.

One of the hardest things about writing this series has been confronting how much I fear being believed. It might be a silly fear, because I don’t plan on starting a cult, and I don’t subscribe to the kind of orthodoxy that might make people adopt me as an authority. However, the price I paid at the door is that I don’t get to pass responsibility on to anyone or anything else. So if I invoke this, either directly or by implication, then I am close to taking on more than I can bear.

I look at the ways people use1 sacred writings and I’m actually kind of horrified. I mean, somebody goes to all that trouble of trying to write something deeply complex and meaningful, and then before you know it some other person is taking that writing to pieces and using it like a dead thing, fodder for an argument, a cudgel to beat people with. Listen, if you use someone else’s spiritual writing then you are, in some sense, trying to be in spiritual community with that person. You don’t have to take everything in the same way they would have taken it, but you should care about who they might have been and what it might have meant to them. You should try to treat them like people.

Me? I’m an existentialist. So, if you do follow anything I say, do it freely. I have no pretensions to the kind of advice that can be usefully followed without first seeing whatever good it might hold, using your own judgment.

Still, sometimes the world could use a few more risks, of the right kind. On that basis, I’ll go ahead and say it. Regard people in depth and with sympathy. I think we might need a lot more of that, just now.

The next post in this series is here.

Something just happens, I said, as a result of being controlled and free simultaneously in just the right way. You might well ask, what?

It is not easy to accurately describe, and it would be impossible to convey in full. Still, I was in that state for a long time—half a day, and then a full day, and then another half day—so there is actually quite a lot to say, and some of it I have said before and some of it I haven’t. Here is one of the things I haven’t said before.

Once, I was in a choir that relied on us reading music in order to function. That is, the sight-reading in the audition was an outright prerequisite. We would practice our pieces a few times, expecting everyone to be able to mostly read it if it wasn’t too complicated, and then when we performed we’d still have the books in front of us. Not my favourite way to sing, because you can get more out of a piece if you know it well, but we did sing some very nice music, and one year at Easter we did Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

Sight-singing is a bit of a dark art, but there are a few techniques that you can learn directly. Two main ones that I know of, in fact. The first is that of intervals. Most people, like me, don’t have absolute pitch; you probably can’t tell what a note is just by hearing it. But if you’re a singer, then you probably do have decent relative pitch, whether you know it or not. You can hear the distance between two notes. So technique number one is to memorise distances between notes.

Often, you start learning intervals by using the first part of a song. A fifth is Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. A fourth is Love Me Tender. A third is—well, actually, by the time I was learning this I knew how to improvise a simple harmony and was therefore already used to hearing thirds both major and minor. A second is the beginning of a scale, and an eighth is an octave. A (major) sixth is My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean. A seventh is actually kind of annoying, but you can do an octave and then pull it down a semitone, if you know both octaves and semitones. Hopefully you kind of get the idea.

Intervals will take you from you from your starting note to the next, and then the next, but you sort of have to recalibrate yourself every time. Every calculation is isolated. Also, if you make a mistake, then intervals will not help you find your place. For that, you need technique number two.

Different notes, in whatever key you’re in, feel different. Most obviously, the tonic (that is, the first note) feels like home. The dominant (fifth) feels strong and easy to find, but it wants to move. The subdominant (fourth) feels gentler though not at rest, like a sort of hovering. The mediant (third) wants to break your heart. The submediant (sixth) has a heart that’s already broken. The supertonic (second) wants to fall to the tonic, but not nearly as much as the leading tone (seventh) wants to rise. That gives you the main seven. Sometimes you can find the rest from there.

So there I am, and I’m not strictly sight-reading Bach, because we’ve seen every part of it at least two or three times, and we’ve practiced some tricky bits in more detail. (There was a key change that we all flubbed, the first time around; you might be able to guess why that would happen.) Still, I am definitely reading Bach, finding every note by calculation and by feel, because I need all the help I can get. The whole time, because this is Bach, everything I sing is being echoed and modulated in all the polyphonic voices around me, unpredictably and creatively in ways I couldn’t possibly follow, though I’m still trying, just in case it helps! And yes, there is also a broader story, but from the middle of things I can barely follow it, most of the time.

It was like that.

I mean, it wasn’t exactly like that. It took me weeks to figure out why I kept comparing the two experiences in my head. The subject matter of the Passion is relevant, with its stark tragedy and its hope of redemption, but there are more subtle connections that matter, too. The state of perception that I was in required less concentration than sight-singing; like balancing, it was easiest when it was already working. But the combination of thinking and feeling is common to both, as is the sense of something deeply patterned and larger than myself, as is the aspect of being overwhelmed, at the limit of my capacity. Thinking over the importance of that complex patterning, I started to see why there are quite a few people who think that Bach, in particular, was divinely inspired.

Relatedly, mosques are decorated with patterns, because in Islam (as in Judaism) you are not supposed to depict God. So, instead, they use designs like this:

I find myself inclined to ask, in response, “That’s what you put instead of depicting God?” But then I remember how every analogy that I want to make feels inadequate. Perhaps “instead” is indeed the right word. Still, the aesthetic similarities between such patterns and Penrose tilings only intensify the analogy. A Penrose tiling is translationally aperiodic, deeply complex, and yet.

It’s not as though I hadn’t considered the idea of a structure too big and complex to fully comprehend. I had, in fact, been playing in the preceding year or two with an idea that I got by reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. There’s a skill you learn, when writing formal poetry, where you have to be willing to bend with the form. It doesn’t matter how pretty a phrase is, if it doesn’t fit you’ll have to find something else. But, on the other hand, you can also use the form to help you. A rhyme can suggest a word that turns out to be perfect. The metre can help you control the emphasis of a phrase. Fitting sincerity to structure is an art, and it can be interesting to play with even when you’re not as good as the great poets.

There’s a plausible thesis that we in modern times are sometimes insufficiently constrained. We have, perhaps, too many choices. Oliver Traldi expresses this well here, but it’s an idea I was familiar with before that—along with a possible response. What happens, when you write formal poetry, is that you give yourself structure. It’s freely chosen, and yet it can constrain you when you need it1. You can do this with your life, too, setting routines and entering commitments. This is only a partial solution, but it is a powerful one.

What I get from Taoism is something different. Rather than lament the insufficiency of our constraints, we could ask if perhaps the world already gives us constraints that we might pay more attention to. Perhaps sometimes it is not that we do not have enough constraints, but that we ignore the ones we do have, pretending to more control than we actually possess, and then we feel insufficiently constrained as a result.

Admittedly, there is some flexibility here in whether you submit to your circumstances or work to change them, but this flexibility is also true of sonnets, in a sense; different poetic effects can be created depending on how smoothly the words fit the structure. Follow the form or fight it, either way you’re using it.

I found this idea sort of fun, but I did not think of it as expressing a truth so much as looking at the same truths in a different way. You could take the whole universe and everything in it to be a set of constraints, in the same way that the sonnet form provides you with constraints. You could work with them, or push against them, but either way there is a sort of elegance, a power even, that can be found in acknowledging that universe-level limitation.

What I had not expected was that I might someday find myself directly perceiving something like that. At least, that might be what I was perceiving. It was hard to say. I certainly couldn’t comprehend it, whatever it was. To think of it as only inside my mind would require a concept of “my mind” that was larger by far than even the largest conception I had ever had of my self. To think of it as outside my mind…

On some instinctive level I understood that, whatever this was, I had to let it be what it was, in order to hold my perception. I was afraid of what I might find, as I always am inside an existential fall, but there was also another sense in which I wanted to understand it more than I have ever wanted to understand anything. It was like being doused in pure motive—not pure in the sense of innocent, but pure as in, if you took the very essence of what it would mean to want something. Yet I needed to be self-controlled, in order to stop my desire to make sense of it from trying to complete it into something it wasn’t.

Balanced on my equilibrium point, I made no sudden moves.

The next post in this series is here.

Falling into the question of how to interpret my own existential fall, I had expectations but I knew I couldn’t rely on them. I thought perhaps I might truly prefer a more theistic view of it; I thought perhaps I might find I still had strong reasons to keep my original interpretation.

What actually happened was much stranger. It felt like there was a sort of maximum that I could detect and aim for—except that in other ways it seemed to draw me in on its own, so, maybe more of a minimum? A saddle point? At the risk of digression, let me explain.

In dynamical systems theory, an equilibrium is a point at which an object will remain stationary, if it is located precisely. If you imagine a marble rolling around on the surface above, then that black dot where the red curve meets the blue curve is an equilibrium. Specifically, it is the type of equilibrium known as a saddle point, because a saddle has a similar “upwards in one direction, downwards in another” kind of curvature.

A saddle point is “stable” from some directions (like the blue line above); if the marble was free in that direction it would naturally move toward the equilibrium. It is "unstable” in other directions (like the red line above). On the red line, to draw the marble towards the equilibrium, you would need to apply some sort of external control, unless you were exactly on the equilibrium, at which point it would balance and remain still.

So I guess what I am saying is, control yourself in one way, and be free in another, and… apparently there is something that just happens once you get close enough? It seemed to.

If the idea of being controlled and free at the same time sounds confusing, think about what you would do if you were trying to think clearly about a complex issue. You would want to be controlled, in the sense that you would want to be carefully sifting through evidence, and making qualitative evaluations, and so on. But you’d want to be free, in that you’d want to be able to come to more than one answer, depending on the evidence. Imagine doing that, without compartmentalizing, and it should give you a rough idea. But there are other factors involved, too. For example, I think it mattered that I was in a state of trust, believing that I could respond subjectively without fear of being pushed around.

The practice of truthseeking without compartmentalization strikes me as notably under-studied, these days. On the one hand we have rationalists talking about how to be “high decouplers” who separate the facts from any distracting context, and on the other hand we have poetic types who talk about using “another kind of truth” that can be separated from all of this overbearing factual science. I will freely concede that both types of thinking have their uses, but I can’t help but think we are missing something.

Compartmentalization is of course a standard reductionist technique. The specific notion of “decoupling” as a skill gained traction amongst internet rationalists after a post from Sarah Constantin noted that the ability to think this way correlates both with intelligence and with better performance on a very specific subset of cognitive bias tests. Constantin’s description was fairly measured about the strengths and weaknesses of this reasoning style, writing that “Cognitive decoupling is the opposite of holistic thinking. It’s the ability to separate, to view things in the abstract, to play devil’s advocate.” In other words, it’s one way of thinking among many.

As is common with ideas on the internet, the concept quickly lost most of its nuance. Rationalists are, notoriously, often very fond of hearing that being smart makes them right about things. It was probably inevitable, given a contrast between detached “high decoupling” and contextual “low decoupling,” that some would conclude that the former is simply better—higher, if you will—than the latter.

I do not dislike detached or abstract reasoning; I have three mathematics degrees for a reason. Still, I get annoyed when I see “high decoupling” used as a synonym for “rational” or “tolerant.” The latter conflation is surprisingly common, because “decoupling” a potentially inflammatory idea from its context can indeed make it easier to contemplate dispassionately. However, tolerance as a virtue is entirely compatible with holistic thinking. If you need to not see the problem in order to tolerate it, then is that really tolerance?

I became particularly wary after a post on the Slate Star Codex subreddit suggested “low decoupling” might explain why some people are leery of discussions about race and IQ even when they come accompanied by cautious disclaimers about their conclusions. The subject of race and IQ is one of the last subjects where you ought to have a policy of simply ignoring contextual implications! There were, always, people in the forums I was frequenting who would covertly (or not-so-covertly) recruit for racist ideologies, sometimes with a little help from the dark version of rationalism in which ignoring your feelings becomes ignoring compassion. If compartmentalization was being used to inveigle people into dispassionate cruelty, then perhaps I ought to avoid it entirely, just to be safe.

The alternative to compartmentalizing a feeling is managing it. Most rationalist-adjacent people do a little of each, I think; few would advocate walling off a feeling if you can more fully ameliorate its capacity to distort your thinking by working through it. To attempt to see clearly while swearing off compartmentalization is therefore an ongoing exercise in personal development. One technique—simple enough in concept—is to learn to be aware of feelings without being controlled by them. Love somebody, and yet be able to see when they’re out of line. Fear somebody, and yet continue to hear them.

Wanting something to be true can make you more likely to believe it. There are some interesting trade-offs that arise when dealing with this. You can cultivate a desire for the truth that is stronger than your other wants, so that you can still be aware of the latter while reminding yourself that the former has higher priority. Alternatively or additionally, you can try to genuinely moderate your desires to reality, or just make your desires less strong overall. All three of these methods avoid compartmentalization, and they are at least partially interchangeable.

Some of my techniques are outright makeshift. If you look at those two moves I was making, prior to the existential drop in my previous piece, they each have a bootstrapping quality to them. I know I will keep my promise to return to the problem of becoming overly fanatical because (a) if the promise wasn’t good, I wouldn’t have the level-headedness needed to seek the truth in that direction and (b) I care a lot about truthseeking so (c) I am willing to make that promise and keep it.

This promise to myself is, again, kind of trade-off. It might be tempting to claim that such trade-offs can be avoided by walling off your feelings instead of paying the price necessary to neutralise them. However, compartmentalization is also a trade-off.

The sub-topic of morality has trade-offs, too. Moral impulses can be extremely powerful, and they can certainly distort your vision. You can falsely expect that something will happen because you think it ought to happen. You can find it hard to accept particular truths because you feel that they would imply moral claims on you. One way to handle this is to distance yourself from morality altogether. Nietzsche’s work has elements of this, but it’s also present, in a different way, in Taoism. “Wise souls aren’t humane,” says Ursula K. Le Guin in her translation of the Tao Te Ching, choosing her stark wording deliberately.

I suppose that I, too, have some of this moral distancing, because I can call on my existential freedom whenever I wish. Still, I consider this a technique of last resort. To prevent myself from expecting things to happen just because they ought to, I generally opt for the tragic worldview, in which good doesn’t always win. As for truths that might imply a moral claim on me, I’ve discussed that a bit in Sections V and VI of this piece. A central element is being able to accept that I’m flawed.

It is not a simple task to genuinely feel a flaw in yourself, without flinching from the underlying facts that imply this. Sometimes, lack of compartmentalization will naturally change your behaviour as a side effect; this is a good thing, if you ask me. Presumably, there are ways of confessing a sin and asking for absolution that also do these kinds of things, but I’m not Christian so I’ve abstracted out what I consider to be the necessary aspects. There is a sort of resonance point where the capacity to feel moral pain intersects with the ability to accept it and you can see both the facts involved and the moral conclusions that you’re coming to as a result.

I don’t know if that resonance point is also the point that saves your soul. It might be. It cannot be a coincidence that the saying about “first take the beam out of your own eye” is about, well, your eye. But I find the broader Christian elements distracting. They shift the components around in a way that makes things blurry—like a telescope, out of focus. If I were Christian, I might have the right to adjust my understanding of the concepts involved in order to sharpen the image. Since I’m not, I guess I’ve just sort of figured out how to take a couple of lenses and freehand it.

I have described this non-compartmentalized approach as a way to grow outward from something alongside rationalism, because that is roughly the way I learned it. From the more poetic end, I may be less qualified to give advice, but I think the first point I would note is that objective topics teach you things about yourself that you cannot afford to ignore. There are some ways of thinking that work better for science because they are particularly suitable in a reductionist context and may not apply outside of it; there are other ways of thinking that work better for science because they correct for human failings in a way that naturally carries over outside the scientific.

There are those who say, wistfully, that natural philosophy used to be about comprehending the mind of God. The rather contradictory implication of such statements is often that science is getting too big for its boots by bleeding outward into the metaphysical in ways that the speaker does not like. But some of the ways that science has changed our thinking are simply correct, even if they mess up our previous holistic understanding. This might seem unfair, but it’s just the way it is. Reductionism can get quite far without even considering its impact on holism, but a holism that reacts to a runaway reductionism by attempting to exclude it is a contradiction in terms.

To think both logically and poetically at the same time might sound threatening to someone who is used to suppressing feeling in order to be rational. Won’t the feelings pull at us? Can we be sure they won’t lead us astray? Yet to the advocates of poetry it might be equally threatening. What if we think logically, and something with deep resonance for us turns out not to be technically true, and we have to abandon it? What if we need that thing?

Even those with a foot in both camps might still be quite realistically aware of potential pitfalls. What if logic and poetry just don’t mesh? What if they make paradox after paradox when we attempt to take them both at once? Can’t we silo them each safely in some non-overlapping magisteria?

There are no guarantees that a more holistic approach will lead to true perception1, and I wouldn’t recommend applying non-compartmentalized methods to a question as big as this without practicing on smaller problems for a while, first. A controlled subjectivity will still give a greater variety of answers than a subjectivity that has been walled off, and different people who approach things holistically can reach different conclusions as a result.

Still, there are some questions in life to which it is natural to bring your whole self. I think this is one of them.

The next post in this series is here.

Twenty-five years after that first existential crisis, the same themes that precipitated it were still shaping me. I went looking through some old Reddit threads while I was thinking about how to write this part of the story, and this entire passage is completely apropos:

Principles can hold you to something more reliable than the whims of the moment, or they can stifle your ability to see the nuances of the particular. They can force you to resist your worst impulses, or they can confirm for you that your worst impulses are just fine the way they are.

I think perhaps both the unreliable poles, here, suffer from incuriousness. The insufficiently principled person doesn’t bother building out the values of the moment to see what they might have to say about other situations. The rigidly principled person doesn’t feel able to look and see what a cherished principle might not take into account.

I approach the whole thing from a position of terrifying existentialist freedom. I care deeply about something that isn’t guaranteed to work out. I can ditch anything I like, whenever I like. It might, however, be very bad for me to do so. That the very notion of “bad” might not be built on firm ground is no comfort to me, and I am a little suspicious of anyone who seems to find comfort in it.

In short, friend, I couldn’t build my philosophy on a single large framework of the kind Christianity supplies, even if I wanted to, because I am not in possession of such a thing. And I might want to, if I could. But it might not be good for me, if I did.

Does that description look a little contradictory, to you? It must have looked a bit contradictory to , because after mulling on it for a couple of days he called me on it:

One odd phrasing, "if I could." You could! What other than your choice limits you from possessing a single large framework? Christianity would be one option, but there's a number of others.

What, other than my choice, indeed? If I had been talking to anyone less than a trusted friend I might have diverted myself, defensively, into a philosophical discussion on the nature of existential choice. To be so completely free, in that way, is actually a profound loss of control. It all depends on how you look at it. You don’t get to use a framework to control yourself, so in that sense you don’t have control. On the other hand, no framework controls you, so you’re free. Yet precisely because the choice is free, it has a lot of staying power. So perhaps in yet another sense it is not free after all; it feels necessary.

Is a thrown object free from your grasp, or is its motion constrained to a parabola?

However, all of this talk would have been avoiding the point. Yes, hypothetically, if I made a free choice I would in a sense be constrained by it, but it had actually been a while since I had made a free choice on the full worldview level. There were some possibilities that had come my way that I hadn’t fully explored yet. There were some small alterations in perspective that had accumulated over time. If I was to be thorough, then I shouldn’t just discuss how choices work! I ought to actually think those through and then make a choice.

For a friend who had just made a cogent query? For the kind of friend who would never hesitate to note a weakness in reasoning, and never take advantage of a weakness in emotion? Yes, I’d take a risk of that magnitude.

Besides, he’d just handed me a new possibility, writing, “I'm not quite sure it would be any less existentially terrifying to have that framework.” This was an idea that hadn’t occurred to me. I had been assuming that anyone with a single over-arching framework would divert responsibility to it. “Don’t blame me, I’m just following [the will of God/my religion/a cost-benefit analysis/the moral law].” If I pre-committed to not doing that, the hope of such relief wouldn’t influence me and I’d have one less moral hazard.

While I was at it, there was another moral hazard that needed tidying. There was a path I wasn’t taking, here—namely, that of following something external to my current understanding of myself1. Instead, I was about to consider taking an internal source and… deifying it? I didn’t like that idea; large parts of my development are of course devoted to not turning into a self-righteous fanatic. But—and here my younger self choruses with me—sometimes you have to consider a thing properly before you can know what would even follow from it. So I pre-committed likewise to only setting that fear aside temporarily. I’d reconsider that issue once I knew what I was dealing with.

Having thus dispensed with both hope and fear, I directed my attention to the question at hand.

Since the conversation thus far had been about religious frameworks, I decided to try to construct my nearest theism. I was aiming to find the way of looking at things that seemed most likely to be something I’d accept, or, at least, understand. Call it a steelman, but in the sense of “construct the version you would find most acceptable” rather than in the sense of “construct the version that the person you’re talking to would recognise.” Important distinction, that.

Plausibly, my nearest theism would be some form of Christian existentialism. Something catches me, when I let go; that much was basically true. I had always attributed this to some sort of obscure but stubborn aspect of myself that simply couldn’t be erased. My conscience? Except that I kind of thought of my conscience as being something else, something constructed of the rules people tell you. This felt, if anything, more reliable, or at least I was treating it as such. Right before you fall in, when you’ve let go of everything else. Call it a guidance.

There is a guidance just before I fall into the abyss and I could in some sense be said to trust it more than my conscience. That shook me. If I removed the assumption that everything detectable by my mind was me, then, yes, one might suppose the existence of an external authority. Probably the only authority I’d accept, in fact.

Well, but should I see it that way? Should I even have an opinion one way or the other?

I had a pre-existing way of deciding these kinds of questions, of course. As I recall, I didn’t even consider that I was about to make the most open existential fall I’d ever done—an existential fall about the existential fall. If I had known what I was doing, I’d have flinched.

I didn’t know. I didn’t flinch.

I fell.

The next post in this series is here.

What does work? I wasn’t sure. But by 2017 I was pretty sure we were in need of whatever alternatives we could find. Coincidentally, around then is also when found my way to a contentious, but comparatively civil, ongoing Culture War discussion1 taking place on Reddit. I’ve always sort of liked conflict. It can be hard to use a trait like that productively, but I try.

I was a distinct ideological minority on that forum, and I found it to be a mixture of the illuminating and the toxic. Sincerely attempting to persuade people who are very different to you is a great way to force yourself to be flexible in your thinking. I had a practical system, already, for bending without losing my moral centre. I needed it.

Much of the time, though, our arguments were not so much exercises in persuading and being persuaded as they were attempts to sincerely understand and be understood. If that understanding led someone to change their mind, then, good! If not, perhaps we’d both learn something. I particularly enjoyed being referred to thinkers I hadn’t seen before. One such was Alan Jacobs, a Professor of English at Baylor University, who wrote, and indeed still writes, a refreshingly peaceful blog about a wide range of topics.

There was something I couldn’t pin down about Jacobs. I now realise that a lot of it came from the philosophical work of Alasdair MacIntyre, but that aspect of its inspiration was not visible on the surface. Jacobs didn’t reference MacIntyre directly as an argumentative authority. Rather, there was a subtle MacIntyrean ethos to Jacobs’ thinking style. Jacobs had a sincere appreciation for what a grounding in a particular tradition can bring to a person’s ability to extract both meaning and virtue from that tradition. Moreover, Jacobs had a nuanced ability to speak across traditions, bringing his own conservative Christianity to the debate in a way that didn’t demand that everyone speak his language. As an English professor, Jacobs brought a cultural depth to both of these practices that went, in some ways, beyond what you would get from simply reading MacIntyre.

At the time, I had no idea where any of this was coming from. Here I was, making halting attempts at “arguing to understand” across Culture War divides, and there was Jacobs, pulling off feats of ideological translation that left me quietly stunned. I still had virtue-ethical leanings, and this was virtue, clearly, even if I couldn’t begin to name what kind.

My admiration for Jacobs brought something new to my underlying philosophy. The school of thought that stems from Descartes, of which I was so enamoured as a child, is one in which all knowledge is to be derived from individual reasoning, without reference to tradition or social practices. But of course I was already aware that there is no such thing as a pristine individual, formed only by rational thinking. We are all influenced by culture, and the attempt to pretend otherwise does not lead us to treat each other better.

From Jacobs, then, I learned by example how to accept and even like the ways in which I was a product of a particular culture, a subjective as well as objective thinker. I could see that this needn’t make me despise those who were differently formed. I could learn to talk from where I was, across those divides. I could be open to insights from other worldviews in a way that still tried to respect both their and my particularity.

None of this made me want to discard my existentialism. I mean, yes, if you chose, you could have some core of tradition that would tell you explicitly what your grounding ought to be, and that freefall at the heart of things would not be necessary. But to me, it made more sense to treat what I was learning from Jacobs as an addition to my existing philosophy, rather than a replacement. Though I had not yet read Iris Murdoch, I think I was latently addressing the critique she makes of existentialism in The Idea of Perfection, in which she suggests that focusing too much on the experience of existential freedom at the moment of choice can be a distraction from the kinds of prior thinking that affect that choice. She writes:

If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.

Murdoch is arguing here against the kind of existentialism that only considers the naked will as an explanation for human motivations, so she supplies this as a demystification that, she thinks, renders the choice itself comparatively unimportant. By contrast, what I was doing was adding these kinds of exterior considerations to a still-very-real existentialism. Murdoch is right to make us see how our day-to-day formation affects us, but I would contend in return that virtue ethics and existentialism can go hand in hand.

When I was responding in the face of sometimes unexpected and often ideologically-hostile argumentation, I didn’t employ a universal moral theory as my ultimate authority that I was holding to. I started out still thinking of myself as “approximately utilitarian in theory, virtue ethical in practice,” and I referred to theory of both types, as needed, but my bottom layer, present even if only occasionally used, was that existential drop. I knew I could change my mind any time I liked. The trick was to try to form myself into the kind of person who would change her mind if and only if it was warranted.

Perhaps predictably, I got less utilitarian over time and more virtue ethical. A precipitating factor in this transition was the way that my concept of “good” got more and more complicated. If you think about it, Culture War topics are an obvious place where this is likely to happen. When your concept of politics is mostly about material concerns, it’s easy to think of most issues as amounting to a mathematical calculation between the interests of different groups. But when politics is about “Who are you?” and “What does a good life even consist of?” the story gets very different. All the messy human dimensions start coming into play.

You can, of course, use utilitarianism on the level of “more good is better” no matter how complicated your notion of “good” might be. But I reached a point where I was seeing lots of important places where that perspective ceased to be illuminating. So, try to weight everyone equally turned, in a lot of situations, into try to empathise broadly. If I hit new information, I didn’t try to turn it into mathematics in some hypothetical equation. I just incorporated it into whatever practical, localised system I had for dealing with the given situation. When my local rules of thumb had lacunae, or contradicted each other … that’s when it got, uh, fun?

Really, I can’t begin to describe the fascination, the beauty, of a small existential drop. I hadn’t known that could be a thing! Terrifying freedom is for the places where you can’t rely on a system to give you the answer, and the most obvious place where you can’t rely on a system is when you’re choosing a system. But if you’ve got that decision point handy whenever you need it, then it can be used with an incomplete system, too, on smaller topics where your system happens to need an assist.

It was, I once explained, “like stepping forward when you don’t know where the next step down is and how far it will be. The ground is generally not too far from where you expect it to be, but there can be a little swoop in the gut for all that.” By its nature, it couldn’t be used unless I needed it; no point in falling if you’re not unsure. But that meant I was using it at the best points in an argument, the surprising moments, every potential change of heart. Particularly if the argument was contentious, there could be something deeply profound in giving an antagonist what was, essentially, a kind of carte blanche. I will take what you have told me, and I will throw my whole self into it, and wherever I land, however it changes me, that is where I will go.

I think, in hindsight, those small risks of my entire self were a kind of love. I couldn’t do it unless the situation was right, but I liked it when I could.

As crazy as it might seem to keep throwing myself into freefall instead of trying to have a settled worldview, from my perspective the practice still felt worthwhile. I had accepted that I had a worldview, with all the rich subjectivity that this implies, and that therefore I was not some pure rational agent, uninfluenced by society. I had accepted likewise that this aspect of myself was worthy of cultivation instead of elimination. However, I didn’t want that acceptance to become an excuse to hide from reality, or from opportunities to change my mind.

Moreover, I was still using the existentialism as a self-sustaining ultimate reason. Why keep my existentialism? Because I want to. Do you think you can stop me? You, and whose God?

Not that I meant to scorn anybody’s God unnecessarily. I was just as interested in understanding religious perspectives as I was in any other ideology. One such point of understanding turned out to be particularly important. It was by way of Jacobs that I encountered for the first time Charles Taylor’s theory of a shift, over time, from human self-perception as “porous” and vulnerable to influence by spirits of all kinds, to “buffered” and self-contained. As Taylor puts it in the explanation linked by Jacobs:

Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are “in the mind.” They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm. But formerly it was not so.

I recognised myself, of course. Self-contained since twelve years old, moral meanings safely stashed in the mind. What I got from Taylor was not that I should change that; I saw no reason to believe I had a mind that could be influenced by good and evil spirits! But it was a fascinating avenue of potential sympathy with people who might see themselves as less buffered than me. I flagged it to myself, quietly, as a resource for trying to comprehend a viewpoint that would otherwise be totally alien.

The next installment in this series is here.

My annoyance coexists with the inconvenient fact that after becoming an existentialist I did become depressed.

In fairness, I had problems that had nothing to do with existentialism. By the time I got to high school I understood that I needed friends, so I forced myself to be around whatever the least objectionable group of girls seemed to be, but I was still pretty withdrawn and I found most other teenagers hard to relate to. I also wasn’t good at finishing assignments unless I was under pressure, so I would create pressure by way of self-directed harsh invective. This worked, at first, but then it started to make me sad, which made me not want to do things, which made me frustrated with my own listlessness, which made me say more nasty things to myself … you get the idea.

Still, the first time I saw one of the school counselors, that isn’t what I talked about. Instead, I talked about my unresolved moral questions. I didn’t know how to be good. I told her about wanting to defend people from being picked on, and about realising that some people didn’t want to be defended. I told her I was having trouble being principled because I knew my principles could be wrong; if nothing else, wrong in the sense that they might not be doing what I wanted them to do. I told her I was starting to realise that, however smart I might be, my skills might not be the most valuable ones to have. I told her that I needed to have ideals but also they were hurting me.

She thought I was wonderful. She told me, people develop in stages1. Stage one is when you’re a baby. Then you develop a will of your own as a toddler, but you’re still basically under your parents, and that is stage two. Then at stage three, you look to your peer group for guidance. At stage four, you start to develop a proper framework. At stage five, you turn into a saint or a hero or whatever. (Okay, she didn’t quite say that last part, but she named some people.)

She told me, I think you are somewhere in between stage four and stage five. That is amazing. Keep doing what you’re doing.

I very much wanted to be a hero and I knew I was not one. I left her office feeling worse than when I went in.

She wasn’t the first to find me, uh, impressive. When I was thirteen I literally had an English teacher who wrote on one of my writing assignments that “If I could find a bookie to take the bet, I would put a lot of money on you becoming very famous, someday, Gemma.” It had made me happy at the time! But now, putting it together with the counselor’s remark, it soured on me. That was a lot of pressure, and I wasn’t sure I could live up to it. Teachers probably shouldn’t say that sort of thing.

Everybody come and look, I snarked to myself. Gemma’s got a funny mind. Fat lot of good it was doing me.

I took to crying, suddenly, at odd intervals, whenever my own thoughts overtook me. Sometimes I could get to a private place before I collapsed. Sometimes I could not. Perhaps this is just as well, because one day I ended up crying in the middle of music class, and music was one of the few classes I had in common with Megan. Megan and I had known each other for years, in various choirs. When I started crying, she didn’t hesitate. She took me straight to a different school counselor, and she told me he had helped her and would help me. He did seem neither actively harmful nor useless, so that was a start.

Megan also told me, before she left, that I should come and sit with her group at lunch, if I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I had, in fact, let my most recent attempt at a friend group lapse; I knew that was bad of me, but I just couldn’t muster the energy. So I went and sat with Megan, and here is the really important thing. Megan was, in a sense, everything I wished I could be but never could be. She was kind. She wanted to help the girls who had trouble making friends. And, crucially, she had the social skills to actually do it. She would collect all the really shy girls into one place, and make conversation with her one other actually talkative friend, and then the rest of us could get to know each other in our own time.

She is amazing. We are still good friends.

That other counselor turned out to be pretty good, too. I think he rather enjoyed talking to me, but he didn’t make a big deal out of my uniqueness or whatever. Upon finding me analytical almost to a fault, he pointed my analysis at practicalities. When you criticise yourself, is that helping you? How do the standards you set for yourself compare to the standards you set for other people? What do you need, physically, in order to feel okay? Can you tell when you’re about to collapse? Can you do anything about it?

I learned what he was teaching me, slowly. Eventually, I was able to see the depression cycle that I was in. Still, I didn’t feel all that hopeful. To make the cycle stop, I was going to have to do things. Talk to people. Go to school. Get out of bed. None of them sounded particularly fun. But if I didn’t do those things…

Did I want to die?

With a paradoxical jolt of fear I realised that I was perilously close to not wanting to live. I had always thought it was a little silly when people responded to my interest in philosophy by asking “What’s the meaning of life?” Why would anybody need one? But I now knew, with terrible immediacy, why the question mattered. I was wanting things less and less, and that was a problem, because wanting was the only reason I had for doing anything, at the heart of it all. If it collapsed entirely, I’d be sunk.

Perhaps I already did want to die. I certainly didn’t want this to go on forever. If I thought there was no end to any of it, I would kill myself.

I told myself, life is finite. You don’t have to do this forever. And I was glad, because if I was inevitably going to die someday then I wouldn’t have to make it happen by my own hand. Then, like a guest at a party that has a fixed ending time, I told myself I’d stay until the finish. I took my fear of wanting to die—that being one of the few strong feelings I still had—and I used it to weave myself back into the world, thread by thread, because at least if you’re involved with things you’ll care about them.

For a while there, every time I was sad about something, I was glad I could at least care about it.

Like (see here), I was very taken by Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and its subplot of Qing-jao, who learns that her whole worldview was falsely constructed to keep her quiescent and decides to continue with it anyway. Her people revere her for the sacrifices she continues to make. I found that realistic. I also found it fascinating, because I was completely certain that her choice was a moral failure, revered or not.

Where was Qing-jao’s alternate counterpart? For a while, I thought it was Quara, passionately devoted to the idea that the virus that threatens her colony is sentient. She ends the book allowing the virus to be destroyed in any case, under difficult circumstances and with few other options. One of the series’ main viewpoint characters thinks to himself that she will carry the weight of that decision all her life. Excellent, I thought. Maybe the next book will tell me what you do after you break a principle you cared about. But in the next book, Quara seemed to have learned nothing. She was still smugly declaring that her principles were better than anybody else’s. This, too, is realistic. Still, where was the other option? There must be one. Perhaps, I thought, Orson Scott Card didn’t know the answer any more than I did.

There were books that could help me in other ways, though. Like many other nerdy atheists, I was very fond of Terry Pratchett as a teen. My favourite character was the witch Granny Weatherwax. She was spiky, and hard on herself, and she seemed a lot like me. Also, I’m about to spoil the climax of Witches Abroad, because it matters to this discussion:

Granny Weatherwax looked out at the multi-layered, silvery world.

“Where am I?”

INSIDE THE MIRROR.

“Am I dead?”

THE ANSWER TO THAT, said Death, IS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN NO AND YES.

Esme turned, and a billion figures turned with her.

“When can I get out?”

WHEN YOU FIND THE ONE THAT’S REAL.

“Is this a trick question?”

NO.

Granny looked down at herself.

“This one,” she said.

By the end of high school, I understood that I didn’t have to put exhausting effort into continuing to be myself; I could let myself just be. I could recognise a depression spiral and address it before it really got going. I could hold a very boring conversation with just about anybody, and I could also hold some interesting conversations with some people I liked. I was learning, cautiously, how to be flexible in my ideals, while forgiving myself for not living up to them, without letting the flexibility and the forgiveness interfere with each other.

I didn’t study philosophy at university. Philosophy is serious business and I’m no good at ignoring my grades; any clash between personal excellence and academic excellence might drive me nuts. Besides, I didn’t want to go through life without understanding quantum mechanics.

I did try another existential drop, though. Like a tune-up for your worldview, right? Check it all the way down to the foundations, just to be sure. You can never predict an existential drop; that’s the point. You have to not know what’s going to happen. It has to be an exercise in which you really could change your mind about absolutely anything.

Even though you can’t predict it, it does get easier. I started to fully realise how free I was, when there was only the void and me. Yeah, I might have to change my mind about something I cared about, but if that happened it would be because, taken as a whole, I wanted to.

By about the third time I tried it, I could sit in the emptiness and watch it bubble like quantum foam. Not something to be done lightly, but always possible at need.

At university I also learned something else. A guy I knew was in a play about conscientious objectors in the first world war, so I went to see it. The character who lasted until the end was the most religious of the three, enduring torture in the field because his convictions wouldn’t let him change his mind. Not my type, but the play’s other two main characters were more complex, and one of them was apparently based on an autobiography. I went to the university library and found it: We Will Not Cease, by Archibald Baxter.

There, in a historical document, I found a kind of person I had never seen in fiction. Fourteen conscientious objectors were sent to the front by an unwisely rigid New Zealand government. Only two lasted out for the entire war without taking the option of enlisting in a non-combat role. One was Mark Briggs, young and zealous, clinging fiercely to his anti-war principles at every turn. The other? Let me quote my review:

Baxter could distinguish symbol from object without losing sight of the importance of symbolism. He could assess risks with a clear eye, without falling prey to un-earned certainty. He could believe in a cause strongly enough to endure torture, and yet believe more strongly in being compassionate to someone who couldn’t endure that torture any longer. He could do this without constant effort of thought; he could find it easier not to think about it.

Baxter was a pacifist, and a socialist, and a Christian of no particular denomination, but what I cared about most was not his views but rather the way he held them. He had endured horrors for what he believed was right—and he had done it open. Not by rigid adherence, but simply by continuing to believe, even as he was willing to change his mind.

Archibald Baxter had a kind of maturity worth striving for. Archibald Baxter was proof that there was a kind of maturity worth striving for.

This is an old song in philosophy, but of course to me as a child it was entirely new. My mind was absolutely blown. I thought that deduction must be pretty much the most incredible thing anyone had ever done. I remember swinging happily on the bars after school, just thinking about it. Philosophy was my new favourite thing. I was going to be just like my Mum—she was a philosophy student at the time—and I was going to learn all about philosophy and maybe one day I’d get to think philosophical thoughts of my own. That would be amazing.

I was already an odd kid. I spent a lot of my playtimes at school staring off into space. The other kids used to wave their hands in front of my face to see if I’d blink. They’d ask what I was doing, and I would say “Thinking,” and they would say “You’re weird.” I thought that was fair enough, except for the part where they sometimes seemed to think there was something wrong with that.

By ten years old, though, those other kids weren’t bullying me as much as they used to. My mother had taught me “assertiveness” a few years earlier, and by then it was more like ferocity. I was not a likely target. I was, in fact, the self-designated protector of all bullied kids, not just me. Whether the kids in question even wanted my help wasn’t especially important; I considered intervening to be a matter of principle. No bullying, because bullying is immoral, and unless you can come up with a good reason to do that (which you can’t, because I am currently yelling at you very loudly and by now you just want me to go away), you had better stop.

I loved Descartes, or thought I did, but I didn’t follow him all the way. I was aware that Descartes had further deduced, from his idea of something more perfect than himself, that there must be some Perfect Being who put it that idea there (since an imperfect being could not conceive of perfection without help). This Perfect Being, namely God, must then exist (or else it would not be perfect). Similarly, being perfect, it must be the ultimate power. And since a good ultimate power would not deceive us, we are therefore excused from doubting our other perceptions.

Like my parents, I was an atheist, and I found these further deductions much less impressive than the first one. At first, I simply declared myself unconvinced by the step from the idea of perfection to its existence. Later, I found myself thinking that it is also not obvious that we can conceive of perfection with any real accuracy. These days, I would add that pretty much any theodicy you like will give you a reason to complicate our confidence in claims like, “It seems like a good God would not allow this.”

This left me with a sort of tiered epistemology, in which, for each of us, our own existence is Tier 1, and objects that we perceive directly are Tier 2, and other people’s subjective experience is Tier 3. I wasn’t a solipsist; truth was important to me and that included the (likely) truths in Tier 2 and Tier 3. Still, I held that those things were able to be doubted, on a theoretical level, in a way that my own existence was not.

The year I turned eleven, I discovered that some other things were able to be doubted, too. Did you know that you can’t win all of your arguments just by yelling at people? You probably did know that, although sometimes on the internet we seem to forget it. Also, it does matter how the person you are trying to defend actually feels about your defence of them. The boy who the other boys picked on didn’t want my help. As far as I could tell, he actually kind of wanted to keep being picked on, because that was his role in the group, and it was better to be in the group than out of it.

As for the girls, their social structure was even more arcane. I didn’t understand any of it. People were complicated. Morality was complicated. I didn’t know what to do.

By the time I was twelve, I was starting to feel like I could barely relate to the other kids at all. I was nominally friends with a few of them, but as the year went on I retreated further and further inside myself. I discovered The Lord of the Rings and read it six times in succession. I held long imaginary conversations with Denethor in which I convinced him not to kill himself. When the other kids started interrupting my thoughts too much I deserted them entirely. I went all the way to the far corner of the playground, where the tall old gum trees grew.

I was desperately lonely. I gave the tallest tree a name in Quenya and pretended she was my friend.

Perhaps it was inevitable that I would finally apply skepticism to the very notion of good.

I think that moment was always coming. I prized doubt, not because it was good in itself but because I considered it a necessary component of truth-seeking, and I cared deeply about truth. I didn’t think it wrong to operate on uncertain grounds, of course; uncertainty is a fact of life. But it would be wrong to pretend to yourself that a thing is more certain than it actually is.

I had, with more pain that you might expect, slowly assimilated my experience with the boy who didn’t want me to stop him from being picked on. It was an object lesson in the necessity of moral querying. A thing might seem to be an unshakeable principle, and yet not be. I had thought that to be moral meant holding to your principles; what now?

Was I even a good person at all? I had liked yelling at people. It had felt heroic. There was always that rush of moral satisfaction, the thrill of a conflict. But I was starting to realise that people needed friends more than they needed defenders, and I was useless at being friends with people. Out here on my own, I wasn’t hurting anyone, but I wasn’t helping them, either. Maybe I was more of a … medium person? A very sad medium person.

In some ways I want to laugh, looking at the lead-up to my twelve-year-old existential crisis. In other ways I want to cry. I was childish and precocious, but these are actually the kinds of questions that are still hard for grown adults. And that’s even before we get to the big one.

I knew a fair bit more about philosophy by now. I knew there were alternate moral theories. I knew about Hume’s is/ought distinction and I could already see how it might be antithetical to my prior conception of morality as purely rational. In theory, if I wanted moral guidance, I should be looking to my moral foundations. And if I was looking to my moral foundations, then perhaps step one was to doubt everything.

I didn’t want to do that.

I was scared. Of course I was! I’d already lost a moral principle, at great personal cost. It was worth losing, because it was clearly false, but I hadn’t enjoyed the experience at all. I didn’t want to risk losing even more. But a good person would ask questions. A good person would care about true and false, even if it hurt. A philosopher certainly would.

Maybe I’d learn something. Descartes couldn’t have beat back total skepticism without first considering it, after all. Sometimes you have to consider a thing properly before you can know what would even follow from it. Also, Kierkegaard1 reckoned that you needed to feel Angst in order to develop as a person. Sartre … actually, I wasn’t too sure about Sartre but apparently Angst was important there too? I wasn’t entirely sure how you were supposed to distinguish Angst from ordinary fear, and it bothered me that there was this apparently-important philosophical concept that referred to something I couldn’t identify, but maybe this would count?

So I made myself look. Suppose there’s no such thing as good. Even the idea of believing it filled me with absolute horror. I didn’t want to treat every action as if it were no better or worse than any other! I wanted to help people! I wanted to look for the truth! I wanted—but if there was no such thing as morality, I could do whatever I wanted. I grasped at the notion like my last best hope.

If I wanted to help people, then I could. If I wanted to act on my moral intuitions, I could; if I preferred to use a broader theory, I could; if I wanted to believe in God—did I want to believe in God? Probably not, but I found myself suddenly understanding why a belief system of some kind would be a thing that a person might want. Questioning everything was awful. Did I even want to do philosophy, if that was what was required?

What if, I found myself thinking, what if we could have a nice big elaborate theory? And then we could keep asking questions, inside our nice big elaborate theory, and they’d have answers, and ideally the answers would include an answer about why we don’t ask that question, and then we could keep on, you know, doing philosophy, for fun, and we just wouldn’t stare at the abyss.

No. A philosophy adopted on those terms would be founded at its heart on fear and hypocrisy and despair. And if there was some true good to be found, out there, then I would be walling myself off from it by way of a deliberately crafted illusion. That couldn’t be right.

The honest way to respond to the situation, I decided, was to abjure the promise of safety in an elaborate theory palace. Explore up there, sure, and learn from what you find, but don’t live there. Don’t take it for granted that there can’t be a true morality, but don’t pretend you’ve found it. When you must make assumptions, make them smaller rather than larger. Stick with a hammock over the abyss. And don’t look down again until you’re ready.

I think it was about six years before I was ready. I’ve come a long way since then.

It’s interesting, looking back. I don’t think it would have been reasonable to expect much more of myself at the time, but I do have commentaries. Descartes got me into that existential crisis in the first place, but Descartes was also how I got out. I took the entire complex of things I thought of as morality, and I stashed them in the safest place I knew. I stashed them in myself.

There’s actually an interesting critique of Descartes, first voiced by Pierre Gassendi, that notes that the self is a pretty complicated concept. Perhaps all you can really say, in the face of total skepticism, is that thinking exists. To say “I am” is to assume a great deal.

I had done something to my sense of self that is, in hindsight, worth drawing out. After this, every time I did something that I “didn’t want to,” I knew that there was another sense in which I was doing it because I wanted to. This change in viewpoint did not make me any less likely to act morally; if anything, I was more severe on myself because I feared losing whatever it was about me that continued to seek something that I still thought of as good. However, it did make me more resistant to the idea of wholly denying myself, philosophically speaking. I would look at Christians, or at Buddhists, and think, you want me to get rid of my self? My entire morality is in there! No, I will not be doing that.

Since I could not be questioning my foundations all the time—or even most of the time—I did need some kind of ethical model, even if it wasn’t my final answer, just to be working with. I liked virtue ethics, but I couldn’t see how to use it without also having some concept of the good to improve myself towards, so I figured utilitarianism would do for a rough answer there. After all, I was in favour of considering everyone equally, and I thought pleasure was better than pain … or did I?

I had been putting myself through a lot of pain. I was a different person at the end of it. And I wanted to be that person, including all of the pain, every last bit. It was agony, but I wouldn’t erase any of it, given the choice.

The sun felt bright. My tree looked more beautiful than ever. I found out that even when I was lonely, if I smiled at a stranger, they’d smile back. Maybe those things wouldn’t cancel out my pain, if you put numbers on them, but they felt valuable. They were like the sweet centre of a sour lolly2.

I always did like those lollies.

I was twelve years old, and I didn’t think the universe owed me anything. Not happiness, not a moral system, not even necessarily any kind of generally accessible truth. But I knew, now, that even if I might never find them, there were some things I would rather seek than not.