One of the less edifying attractions of philosophy is that it encourages you to use long words when colloquialisms would do. The justification for this is usually that these philosophical terms of art are more precise, so if you want too think rigorously, only jargon will do. Sometimes, however, that’s technically known as bull.
Something very mundane got me thinking about this. I’ve had a surprisingly hectic week. ‘Surprisingly’ only because there are some things I never learn from experience, such as: you are always more, not less busy after a major deadline because all the things you have been putting off to meet the deadline can no longer be avoided.
So there I was, feeling somewhat overworked, in need of a break, wondering if I should skip this newsletter for a week. Whenever I feel that, a little voice starts reminding me that if I think I’m overworked and under stress, I don’t know the half of it. I’m soon reeling off a long list of all the people who have more of a right to complain than me: commuters working long days in jobs they don’t like, new parents, cleaners physically working all hours for peanuts, not-so-new parents, school teachers, parents, period.
But I also remember that such comparisons are of limited value. The kind of overwork I’m experiencing is of course very different from and preferable to many others. But it’s still a stress, so go easy on me if this newsletter has more typos than usual. Making these comparisons is, as the old idiom goes, like comparing apples and oranges.
And then the philosophical voice intervenes with a more technical way of putting it: these different kinds of stresses are incommensurable. That sounds more precise than a simile concerning fruit. But ever since I heard Ruth Chang give the 2019 Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Cardiff lecture, I’ve been sceptical that this word actually makes things more precise at all. As Chang said in one of her papers, far from allowing precision, ‘philosophers have used the term “incommensurable” to cover a jumble of loosely related ideas’.
One of Chang’s key points is that ‘incommensurable’ doesn’t mean ‘incomparable’. You can compare apples and oranges, for example. ‘Incommensurable’ is generally taken to mean ‘lacking a common measure’ but there are many measures that can be used for both fruit: colour, size, weight, softness, vitamin C content, acidity, and so on. Similarly you can compare my kind of being overworked with others. If you do that, I usually score less on hours worked, physical effort exerted, time spent away from home, being underpaid, and so on.
There is even a sense in which many metaphorical apples and oranges can be normatively ranked, to use another generally redundant technical terms when we could just say ‘ranked according to value’. Without question it is worse to be overworked down a mine that at a desk, in employment or self-employed, doing something you don’t like or doing something you do, and so on.
So it quickly looks like ‘incommensurable’ isn’t capturing anything clear or vital at all. It is as vague and inaccurate as saying ‘you just can’t compare them’. All we mean is that the comparisons are not precise, because the things being compared cannot be judged by entirely the same criteria. But they can be compared, and sometimes even ranked.
I suspect that most of the time when people use the word ‘incommensurable’ they are using a technical word which is worse than just trying to describe what they’re talking about in ordinary language. My feeling that I have too much on my plate but that I am nonetheless fortunate isn’t made any clearer by saying that we’re talking about incommensurable pressures. Rather, what I’m trying to articulate is that although my burdens are less serious than those of many others and even connected with good things, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have their own unique negative qualities and these cannot be nullified simply by recognising that, all things considered, I’m in a good place.
I think we all have experiences like this from time to time. They’re often called ‘first world problems’, like moving home, changing jobs, traveller’s diarrhoea. The right way to relate to these is to appreciate both that they are deeply connected with privilege and that they really are difficult for us to cope with. These two truths are not incompatible. If we try to pretend that we should be able to brush such problems off, we’re asking ourselves to be unrealistically Stoic, aka inhuman. But if we allow ourselves to feel we’re the most unfortunate people in the world, the problems feel even bigger than they need to. And if we feel we need to use the word ‘incommensurable’ to understand all of that, we have more learning than sense.
Bargain Book of the Week
This week I’m offering paperback copies of How the World Thinks which I’ll happily sign, with a dedication on request. These are going for £7 each (RRP £9.99), with free worldwide postage and packing for supporters, or £2.50 p&p UK, £3 Europe, £5 Rest of the World. If you want one, just reply to this email saying so and I’ll issue a PayPal invoice.
New at JulianBaggini.com
An article on Hume as a historian that was published in Aspects of History a whole ago has now been posted online. This draws on my book The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well.
The next episode of the microphilosophy podcast will be available very soon. For boring technical reasons, if you’re a long-standing listener you may find your feed isn’t updating and the most recent recent episode shown is ‘How can we talk about trans rights and women’s rights? Pt1’. If so, you need to search for the identically titled newer one and subscribe to that.
If you live near Bristol, you might want to come to one of my monthly Philosophical Times sessions at St Georges. The blurb says ‘Join the brilliant [sic] writer, thinker and St George’s resident philosopher, Julian Baggini, as he explores some of the big ideas that connect with and emerge from this week’s news stories. Sit back and enjoy the live conversation or take part as much as you like – this is always a lively and inspiring discussion!’ Numbers are capped and March has already sold out, so book now if you want to come in April, May or June, before we break for the summer.
I forgot to mention a few weeks ago that I was a guest on BBC Radio Four’s Naturebang programme on Octopuses and the Mind-Body Problem, which you can listen to here. I was talking about consciousness, not octopuses, of which I know so little I wasn’t sure that they weren’t actually octopi.
On my radar
I’m continuing to chair the Royal Institute of Philosophy London Lecture series online, most Thursday evenings until late March. This week we have Amy Olberding drawing on Confucian philosophy to discuss ‘Community Practices and Getting Good at Bad Emotion’. Olberding is very astute and I’m looking forward to this. You can watch them all afterwards on YouTube but we really like a live audience to ask questions. Otherwise, I get to ask all of my own.
I’m reading a couple of books on masculinity, in order to review them. One is philosopher Nina Power’s What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents, the other French historian Ivan Jablonka’s A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice. I don’t want to say too much prior to the reviews coming out but both are interesting and their publication perhaps tells us something about the collective need to reconsider what it means to be a man today.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for your interest. Until next time, if nothing prevents…