Reason and Rhythm

Milo and Adrian meet up after the Thanksgiving holiday

Milo (sliding into the booth, setting down his horn case): You ever notice, Adrian, that every philosophical argument we’ve had—Russell, Kant, free will, perception—always ends up right back at the self? As if we’re circling something we can’t quite name.

Adrian (adjusting his glasses): I notice you end up there. Every time. You’re like a compass whose north is your own consciousness.

Milo: Can’t help it—I’m a performer. The self is the stage on which the world appears. Without the self there’s no world, no knowledge, and no ethics. It’s the core problem—it’s the hard problem. Not consciousness. Consciousness is often a disguise for the self.

Adrian: That’s backwards. Philosophy doesn’t orbit the self. The self is just the condition under which we solve deeper problems—space, time, causality, number, reason. You keep promoting it to the starring role when it’s really the backstage crew. Some, like Hume and Derek Parfit, reduce it to a bundle of neuronal interactions.

Milo: Precisely. Or, actually, not very precise. The self is a bundle? That’s the best eliminativists can do? Ask me to define any word—elephant, bread, emotion—you name it. And my answer can be that it’s a bundle. Except, of course for the antonyms of bundle. (laughs) Backstage crew?

Adrian: Part of the production. Not the point of it. Look—what got us into philosophy in the first place? For me, it was the elegance of a logical proof, the way reason pulls order out of the mess. That has nothing to do with the self.

Milo: Doesn’t it? That’s the problem with you rationalists. You’re never willing to admit who is doing the reasoning. As if proofs themselves are the ones driving cars and going to the ATM and having sex with your wife at night. (Why am I thinking of Elon Musk?) A proof assumes a point of view, Adrian. A subject who sees necessity. A mind recognizing itself in the structure of the world. Logic is a mirror for the self.

Adrian: Logic is public, Milo. It isn’t your mirror or anyone’s. That’s the whole reason Russell is worth reading. He tried to liberate truth from psychological drama.

Milo: And he failed. Even Russell’s truth depends on a knower. If the self weren’t there, what would truth even mean? Why would facts have meaning? Why would it be important if we are 92 million miles from the sun if we weren’t talking about we—this bundle of selfs?

Adrian (shakes his head): Truth is invariant under who happens to know it. You sound more like Nietzsche every time we talk.

Milo: Nietzsche wouldn’t be caught dead in a place with this lighting.

(They both glance at the bar’s flickering pendant light and listen again to the jazz trio playing. What would Nietzsche think of jazz, Milo wondered.)

Adrian: The problem is that when you say “self,” you smuggle in everything: experience, embodiment, memory, temperament, improvisation—your jazzman metaphysics.

Milo: And when you say “self,” you strip everything away until nothing’s left but the bare frame. A self with no pulse. No hunger. No fear. No swing.

Adrian: Because the living parts are contingent! The interactions are passive. Philosophy needs the necessary, not the biographical. If you start from the living self, you’ll never get beyond particularity.

Milo: Exactly. Because there is no beyond. The living self is the ground floor. You start there or nowhere. That’s what I’m arguing. And I’m done reading any more philosophy that doesn’t at least acknowledge the self. There’s nothing without it. I understand that truth and logic could be built into the universe. But it takes a self to discover it, if not invent it.

(The trio begins a slow blues in A-flat. A brushed drum rhythm vibrates the glasses on the table.)

Adrian (leaning in): All right—let’s grant your premise for a moment. Suppose the self really is the center of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics. What do we gain?

Milo: Clarity. Honesty. A philosophy that matches how life is actually lived. The metaphysical question—“What is real?”—depends on a standpoint. The epistemological question—“How do we know?”—depends on capacities of a subject. The ethical question—“How should I live?”—presupposes an agent. The self is the intersection of all. The rest is science—biology, chemistry, and physics. Of course, the physicists would say it’s all physics.

Adrian: But that just shows the self is a link, not the substance. A node in a system. Kant would say: yes, the self conditions experience, but we study the conditions, not the self. The self is the lens; philosophy examines the optics, not the photographer.

Milo: That’s not philosophy, that’s physics. And a physics which isn’t up on quantum physics. Kant is the great champion of the self. He’s our modern hero who gifted us this thinking.

Adrian: That’s very poetic. Not very convincing.

Milo: Let me try another angle. When I improvise, I’m not thinking about music as some external object. The music is me. The horn is me. The audience, the room, the bass drum pedal creaking—me. There’s no boundary where the “world” ends and the “self” begins. It’s all one lived field. I’m sorry, that’s music not philosophy. But music gives me insight into philosophy. Philosophy is not just the optics, and unless it takes the photographer into account, I’m no longer interested. Because it’s just naive and incomplete!

(Milo sets down his beer hard enough that the waitress comes right over.)

Milo: Yes, another!

Adrian: That’s just Merleau-Ponty talking through the alcohol.

Milo (shrugs): No, this is me.

Adrian: The problem with your view is that it dissolves the self into experience. Then turns around and says the self grounds experience. Circular. How do you break that?

Milo: I thought you’d never ask. And your view denies the living self in order to keep your systems clean and inhuman.

Adrian: Necessary.

(A pause. The trumpet player takes a metaphysical solo.)

Milo: So here’s our split, Adrian. You think philosophy is about the structure of reason, and the self is just one of its artifacts. I think philosophy is about the structure of human being, of understanding, and of morality.

Adrian: Close. But let me refine. I think philosophy aims at the universal. And what’s universal in us is reason, not the idiosyncratic self.

Milo: And I think what’s universal in us is selfhood—the very condition of having any access to reason, world, or value in the first place.

Adrian: So for you, the self is the doorway.

Milo: For you, it’s the doormat.

(Adrian cracks a rare smile.)

Adrian: I’ll give you this, Milo. Your version of the self—messy, embodied, improvisational—captures something philosophy often forgets: the warmth of the world. The subject who bleeds into what it knows. Wordsworth—and don’t ask me why I remember this—talked of knowledge “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.”

Milo: And I’ll give you this: your necessity gives philosophy its backbone. Without structure, the self collapses into sentiment.

Adrian: So we disagree on where philosophy begins.

Milo: And what it’s for. I’ll admit that when I watch my two cats I can see the externalist pathways you lay out for perception. Not so much for reason. They have a more limited and primitive self—thank god we’re in person and I’m not tweeting that line—and does this account for the more primitive reason. Surely you see that an advanced self is necessary for advanced reasoning.

Adrian: An advanced self? I’ll leave that for next time. But we agree philosophy needs both: a living subject and a universal frame.

Milo (raising his glass): To the tension, then.

Adrian (clinking): To the tension. May it be productive.

(The trio ends their tune on a soft, unresolved chord—just the way Milo likes it.)