I had a bit of a revelation in Philosophy of Mind class; an upper level college course.
I noticed in class that people would subtlety change exactly what it was that they were talking about. Someone else would propose a challenge to their argument, and the original speaker would get mixed up with the wording and/or lose the point. It is the nature of our language that subtle changes in wording greatly vary the connotation of any given sentence, not to mention the many variations in the way that sentence can be interpreted.
But I think that many people who philosophize in general have overlooked a significant point that is so often seen… and not seen.
Philosophy probably started by one person asking another, how do I exist? The two started talking and somewhere in the back and forth, the “I” of the first person was lost. It turned to them talking about both their experiences. This is fine and wonderful until one forgets that their experiences are from different vantage points. We’re in class agreeing that all our dreams are different and somehow overlook that same fact when arguing which theory in philosophy is the most correct. We find ourselves arguing to get to the truth, but meanwhile the obvious is going unrealized; someone looking for the keys they’re holding in their fist. We’re all trying to get A’s, pass the class, and get involved in the thrill of debate, so most likely not many will look at the heart of this. However, my observations made me think of a man named Howard Moskowitz.
In short, he revolutionized the food industry. He was a small-time food consultant when the Pepsi company came to him with something called aspartame. A substance that could replace sugar to make a “diet” drink. They gave him a scale between 8 and 12% to work with, asking which percent concentration would make the “perfect” diet Pepsi. It was a fairly straightforward question, so Howard put together test groups to collect statistical data as to which percentage people preferred. When he got back the results and plotted them on a graph, the information turned out to be a jumbled mess. Most would look at the data and average it out to a perfect ten, considering maybe people don’t find it so easy to define what they mean by “sweet”, or they made a mistake, etc. But it perturbed Howard-he was convinced there was something wrong. The Pepsi company went ahead to create and sell the “perfect” diet Pepsi, but Howard thought about it for years. Then he had a revelation, and would start showing up to Pepsi conferences telling them they’d been asking the wrong question… he would stand up and say that while they had been looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the right Pepsis.
People didn’t quite understand, they thought he was crazy or foolish and would dismiss him. He talked about it for years, found it hard to get work, until a pickle company came to him asking him to help them find the “perfect” pickle. He told them they were not looking for the perfect pickle, but the perfect pickles. He told them they did want to make regular pickles, but also zesty pickles. And now we have zesty pickles.
His name-making success came next when the Campbell soup company approached him with their struggling tomato-sauce company: Prego. Ragoo was their main competitor, a thinner tomato sauce that Prego couldn’t figure out how to outshine. Naturally they came to him to help them make the “perfect” tomato sauce. Howard told them they wanted perfect tomato sauces. Prego and he varied their tomato sauce in the kitchen up to 45 times, with varying levels of garlic, spices, sweetness, chunkiness, etc. He then went over America and set up test groups to gather data. When he got the data, he didn’t try to see which sauce was the most popular; there was no perfect tomato sauce.
Instead, what he came up with was that Americans gravitate toward one of three kinds of tomato sauce. People either like sauce: plain, spicy, or chunky. At this time there was no “chunky” variety available, and Prego made millions by selling a variety of tomato sauce nobody had realized they had been craving. Other companies in the food industry realized they had been asking the wrong questions. Now there are 20 kinds of wheat thins when you walk into a grocery store.
I actually brought this up to a colleague who said, “Well you know, I knew that already, everyone is different”. But that is the point. My friend/anonymous colleague, there was no need to sputter in defense to your intelligence. You knew it, but did you realize it? Philosophy can all too easily serve more as a linguists’ playground than as a common ground to getting things done and talking with people (rather than against them for some amorphous reason). My statements here may piss off some philosophers. But don’t be offended. You already knew this.
However, if you think you already know all about what I’m trying to say to you, you’re missing the point. Remember all the focus groups that took place before Howard changed the food industry. The way they were thinking was: if you want to find out how people like their food, you ask them. But when surveyed about tomato sauce, no one asked for chunky sauce, even though 1/3 of the people were craving it! We can’t define our happiness when straight out asked, or our way of being. It’s not so easy/perhaps possible to define what we want in our sauce, just as it’s not easy to explain how we live, or how/if it is that we “are”.
And again we bump into what it means when we ask something like language to define us and our experiences. It is inadequate. Example being: there is one English word for “love”. However, there is sisterly love, parental love, romantic love, lusty love…and again this is obvious. So why is there so much confusion possible when I say to someone, “I love you.” We rely on it to explain us. No one defines the inherent variety when they are saying to someone, “I love you”, and it becomes a universal.
A Universal law, a universal truth to explain everybody or everbody’s experience. We can learn from Howard’s experience as well as others to improve our way of thinking, and embrace variability rather than a world of universals. We’re taught to embrace diversity. It’s plastered all over our schools, in books, and in the media. But we’re still searching for universals in philosophy.
The belief that there is a hierarchy in philosophy is false; one answer is not better than/above another. Is it not conceivable that perhaps some live on after death in some way, and others just cease to exist? Inevitably, we fall into groups naturally: The materialists, the dualists, and on and on. We fall into groups like we do in politics. Democrats, republicans etc etc. But in politics, people still squabble as though one group is right, one is wrong, and another is just ignorant, etc etc.
We can do better.
The two philosophers that originally asked, “How is it that I exist?” were not wrong: They were overlooking the obvious. But now I can ask you, “How is it that we exist?” and we can talk with each other. In class we talk about bending the spoon from the matrix. Well, there is no (perfect) spoon.
End note: By the way, I feel like I’m in some ridiculous matrix. It was so difficult for me to write this paper.
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A little bit long, but nice work.
I like the questions you posed, I mean philosophy is intriguing however there is no 'right' or 'wrong' answer.
+mspin
Haha...
yea, it totally looked a lot shorter in microsoft word.
word. Glad you found it interesting.