Sense and Nonsense

I'm going to talk about this case that Instapundit mentions, about a transgender student who is now disqualified from serving in elected office because 'she's now a white male,' and we all know (and the student agrees!) that white males in power is a terrible thing.

The philosopher Wittgenstein was worried that a lot of things we say are nonsense. He meant something specific by that. Suppose I tell you: "I have parked my zonk in the garage." Now you might be thinking that you have almost understood what I said. If only you could learn what a zonk is, you'd have a complete picture of the sense of my sentence. But in fact, there is no such thing as a zonk (except the beloved military expression): my alleged sentence is nonsense.

The danger of nonsense is that I have confused your vision of the world. You now believe in something that doesn't exist. Possibly I will find you snooping around my garage later, attempting to locate this mysterious object that you believe exists, but which in fact does not and never has existed.

Wittgenstein extended this concept in a very famous argument called 'the private language argument.' Briefly, he suggests you imagine that you are having a feeling now that you've never had before. You decide to name it with a private word. Later, you have another feeling, and try to decide if you should call it by the same name. What standard is there to judge if the feeling is the same? Well, we can't really bring back the original feeling and compare it: as everyone knows (and as is a great blessing), remembering grief is wholly different from grieving. So all you have to go on is your own sense that the two things are the same: but that is just what you wanted to check. There is no objective standard against which you can test the sense you have right now that the two feelings are the same feeling. You therefore have no objective reason to say "I feel X," where X is the private name you gave to your original feeling.

So what do you do with the biological adult female who doesn't want to be called a woman, but instead wishes to be called by a male name and referred to with male pronouns? She says she is 'masculine of center,' but what's the objective standard for judging that? She has never experienced being a man. How is she going to check her experience objectively against the experience of being a man? How can she say it is the same experience? There's no objective standard.

There are three sensible ways of dealing with this.

1) We can follow Wittgenstein's general recommendation, and stick to what we can talk about objectively. Then, she is a woman, and that's that. However, we can still respect that she is a woman with unusual tastes and sensibilities and -- if we want to -- elect to respect her wish to be referred to as "him" instead of "her" and so forth. This is not done out of justice, if we are sticking to Wittgenstein's love of the objective, because nothing objective exists to convince of the validity of the claim. Rather, it is being done out of the milk of human kindness. We're doing it because we want her to feel more comfortable, and less stressed, and that's fine. We all know we're talking about a woman, but we agree to talk in the way this person prefers.

2) We can meet Wittgenstein halfway. We can sever sex and gender, as is very popular in the academy just now. Then there is an objective standard for the claim: what our student is saying is not that 'she is really a man,' but that of the observable behaviors typical of males and females, the male behaviors are more comfortable. Because we can all observe and compare them, these genders are objective. So the claim that 'this is a white male' is objective fact, although good luck getting him to father your children. So we have to keep these categories in mind, and never forget that sex really exists and gender really exists, and a person has one of the first and at least one of the second. And the reason to go to all this trouble is the same as the reason in (1), which is that we want to make this person more comfortable out of human sympathy.

3) We can accept the peril of speaking nonsense, and talk about things that we experience in non-objective ways. We do this all the time. Strictly speaking, Wittgenstein's private language argument ends up making nonsense out of all talk of emotions. After all, every emotion we experience is like this; and if we call it 'sadness' or 'joy' or by some private word isn't the real point. I have no way of knowing if the word you use that means 'joy' refers to the same emotion that I refer to by that name, no more than I can be sure that today's "joy" is really the same thing as last week's. All talk of emotions is nonsense.

Now I said something that ought to call that proposition into question. I said that we all know that experiencing grief is not like remembering it. That's not an objective claim, but it is one to which we will all assent. We can come up with a lot of these agreements: this thing I call 'grief' is the emotion I experienced after a damaging loss of a loved one; it seemed to strip meaning from the world; etc. We can't be perfectly sure that the experience was exactly the same, but we can talk around it a lot and discover that it is sort-of the same.

We have strong reasons, then, to think that many things Wittgenstein would have to classify as nonsense really are ontological facts. Grief exists. We might wish it didn't, but it does.

So we can say, on this model, that the claim that 'she is really a man' doesn't refer to anything objective, but to something immediate and subjective: perhaps the spirit. This commits us to a belief in the reality of the spirit, and furthermore to the idea that it carries a kind of sex: there are spirits of men and spirits of women. Even severed from a physical body, the spirit retains this essential quality. And that is a very ordinary way of speaking for Christians, who don't think their grandmother ceased to be a woman when she passed on to the realm of waiting for the Resurrection; certainly not that St. Mary did!

On this model, we are really accepting the claim of the transgendered person at face value. They really are in the wrong kind of body, somehow. But that's not so surprising: people are often born in bodies that are imperfect, and imperfectable. They are born blind, or without limbs, or in other similar ways. We don't believe that they are deformed essentially, not in spirit. Indeed it is a point of doctrine that their body will be perfected according to the nature of their spirit in the end times.

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The choice of roads is up to you. I am not offering a prescription on this one, just a sketch of the philosophical problems it raises.

If you took the first road, you would never think of running a campaign against this student for 'being a white male.' On the first road, you'd be keenly aware that she was a woman, and the fiction that she was a male was being maintained merely out of human kindness. If the only reason to maintain the fiction is human kindness, it won't do to slap her around. The whole point was to make her feel better in your community.

If you take the second road, you might speak and even think that there is a real sense in which this is a white male: but it is a sense separate from sex. Thus, there are no reasons to be concerned that 'a white male' in the sexual sense would be being elected. You have failed to maintain clarity about your categories. This is a male only in the gender sense, not at all in the sexual sense. If you are a sexist who believes sexual-males should not hold power, be at ease. I would be willing to wager heavily that this gender-male does not hold three values that I do, and is apparently the first one to line up and agree that people like me shouldn't hold power. We're dangerous and scary. (True facts, actually! From where I sit that's just why we're the right ones to elect to exercise certain kinds of power. Separate conversation.)

Only if you take the third road is this really a man, in the same sense that I am a man: essentially. If you take that road, you are committing to an ontology that includes the spiritual. Good if you do, but beware: there are many consequences that follow from that choice.