A note from Brandon: The title makes it sound like this post is about Saturday Night Live’s Continental. Don’t be fooled.

If my 18 year old self knew I was writing a non-ironic post on this topic, he would smack me in the back of the head. Hard. 

Some friends were reading Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages and suggested it to K and me, so we gave one of the book’s quizzes a try. It asks people to compare how important five different means of expressing respect and affection are to them: gifts, attention, affirmation, help, and touch. We didn’t learn anything too surprising, (K [No, not that one] already knew, for instance, that I rarely care about gifts, even though I appreciate someone carrying enough to pick one out for me), but the exercise led to a nice discussion about what makes both of us feel loved. If you can get your family to put their smartphones down for a minute, it could provide a good way for you all to reconnect. (Oh, who am I kidding? Surely there’s an app by now. Tell them they can pick their phones back up.)

A student once asked me after class if I thought Patterson Office Tower – P.O.T. – had secretly been named in honor of Kentucky’s de facto leading crop. Examining his bloodshot eyes more closely, I asked how much pot he had had to smoke to come up with the idea. He grinned nervously then ran away. I miss Kentucky sometimes. 

One day in graduate school I was wandering the 14th floor of Patterson Office Tower trying to decide what to write my dissertation on, when the head of the department stopped me to note that one of the best things about our field was that you could study anything and call it “Philosophy.” Specifically, he noted that “You could even write about surfing and call it the Philosophy of surfing.” As he walked away I asked myself, “Does Don really want me to write about surfing? Or is this his subtle way of telling me that I’m being very undude (NSFW)?” But it was neither. He just wanted to point out that you can philosophize about anything. Even love languages. So here goes.

First, let’s talk about what makes a language. Language has two main components:  meaning and structure. Many linguists, following Noam Chomsky‘s lead, have paid greater attention to the latter, cataloging the rules for combining words into phrases and sentences that native speakers normally pick up without realizing they’re learning them, often without being able to explain them. (It was fun to sit around the Stammtisch and realize that we non-natives had an easier time spelling out the rules for which form of “the” to use in German – der, die, das, den, dem, des – even though our Germans friends could of course follow those rules more fluidly than we could. As compensation, one of those Germans had a name for a verb tense we liked to employ in Kentucky in sentences such as, “If he’d wanted to get home before midnight, he would have had to have driven his own car” – which we naturally made trickier to track by pronouncing the key phrase, “woulda haddawa.” Its official name was something like the “past pluperfect hyperbolic subjunctive,” though I still prefer to think of it as “the woulda haddawa tense.”) But although structure is essential to language as we know it, it’s still secondary to meaning. Structure is like the steel frame supporting a skyscraper. Meaning is everything that fills in that frame – even if its only a single story – to create a room where people can work and live.

The easiest way to understand what meaning is is to relate it to action. When I dig holes in the dirt, plant seeds, and water them, my actions are directed at getting plants to grow in my garden. My behavior is making a physical difference in the world. But as all social animals know, every action can also communicate. If for instance, my spouse and I have been squabbling all weekend about whether we’re each doing enough around the house, I might engage in all that gardening activity in order to demonstrate that I’m doing my part. In addition to their physical effect, then, my digging, planting, and watering also convey the meaning that I contribute to the household. All actions can have meanings. Language is distinct in minimizing physical effects in favor of maximizing the meaning it conveys. Speaking always has physical effects on the environment, including increasing the carbon dioxide in the room. But such physical effects are nearly always less significant than the meanings of our words. (That’s why when our words are particularly meaningless, others say we’re full of “hot air.” The quality of the gasses that extrude from your mouth should be the least noteworthy aspect of your speech.)

By this measure, Chapman’s categories hold up well as examples of language. Giving someone a gift or a hug doesn’t have the grammatical structure of a sentence like, “Ah, my great bundle of sweetness, it is love, love, love at sight first,” but they likely do a better job of expressing your care for the recipient. And even if these exchanges have greater physical effects than speech usually would, in most cases I would expect the meaning they convey to be more important. So I’m going to side with the author here: the examples he offers really should be considered languages of love.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. What really grabbed my attention was whether Chapman had captured all of the major categories of love languages. Check out that list again: gifts, attention, affirmation, help, and touch. Are those the main ways you give and receive love? A little Googling shows that at least one commenter has suggested food as an additional category, which fits nicely with the theme of the Bistro. The other option that comes to mind for me is play.

Play is so essential to my way of being in the world that I can hardly imagine life without it. I’m approaching the end of my first year living here in the Pacific Northwest, and while there is so, so much I love about this place, I’m still building my network of friends. That’s in no way a knock on the wonderful people I’ve gotten to know, who are kind, helpful, neighborly sorts all around. But very few of them want to play as much as I do. I realized this in part because I got to have coffee a couple of months ago with someone who does like to play that much. Without intending to, we immediately fell into the sort of goofy verbal sparring that I’m almost constantly engaging in by myself when I don’t have anything better to do (and often when I do). Our whole conversation was just the perfect balance of serious discussion punctuated at nearly every comma and full stop by some absurdity. I could analyze why play like this means so much to me – how it alchemically transforms both everyday and existential frustrations into sudden and enduring bursts of joy – but I don’t even think that’s the point. The point is simply that play does make me feel alive and connected in a way nothing else ever has or will. It’s my principal language of love.

So that’s the question I’ll leave you with as your after dinner mint: What’s your language of love? Don’t feel generic if Chapman captured yours. This isn’t a contest. But whether your favorite is on his list or not, I’ll suggest that it’s a valuable and affirming thing to know about yourself.

So: What’s your real native tongue?

Photo credits: Gary Chapman, University of Kentucky

If you asked most Philosophers where Western Philosophy began, they would probably say “Ancient Athens” and leave it at that. But if you kept buzzing at them, gadfly-like, they would likely cite Socrates’s challenge to the Sophists for the hearts and minds of Athens’ youth (read: male, propertied elite) on the question of whether they should learn the Sophists’ art of winning arguments regardless of whether or not one is in the right, or instead Socratic pursuit of truth for its own sake. This is the mythic origin of the Philosopher’s creed that truth is more important than influence and other worldly goods. The unexamined life, as the say goes, is not worth living. And that  examination must be rigorous even if the rigor leads you toward denial of the world and your self. It’s a heady principle, with more than a little resonance with Christian asceticism. Socrates, too, was a martyr after all.

“Two words, fellows; two words: hemlock smoothies!”

I though about all this recently while pondering an open letter from San Jose State University’s Philosophy Department to Harvard Philosophy Professor Michael Sandel. (You can see the letter here and Dr. Sandel’s response here.) At issue is the attempt by the San Jose State to offer Sandel’s famous course on justice as a MOOC – a massive open online course. (If you don’t know what a MOOC is, you might consider it the educational equivalent of World of Warcraft. And if you don’t know what World of Warcraft is, I’m not going to corrupt your pristine worldview further here.)

This is actually a Moog synthesizer, not a MOOC. Isn’t it pretty?

The background for this case is the ongoing effort by colleges and universities to use technology to control instructional costs – an effort that has largely failed to date – and the corresponding response by faculties across the country to prevent what they see as the mechanization and de-professionalization of teaching. This letter fits neatly into the debate as it has developed to date, but is nevertheless noteworthy for being so public and for making a justice-based appeal to one of the world’s most prominent theorist of justice. That, I suspect, is why it made the Chronicle of Higher Education.

But that’s not why the letter interests me most. Instead, I’ve found myself thinking about how well it measures up to the standards of Socrates vs. those of the Sophists. Now, in Philosophical circles I’m using loaded terms here, and maybe even fighting words. The adjective “sophisticated” notwithstanding, no Philosopher wants to be compared to the Sophists. But I mean the comparison in good faith. It’s my view that the San Jose State Philosophy Department’s public protest holds up better if evaluated as a piece of political rhetoric, evaluated primarily on its persuasiveness, than if it is judged as an attempt at pursuing the truth in Socratic fashion. And I wonder if we should expect otherwise, even from Philosophers.

The letter’s argument is not by any means bad, but it does not meet the standards that I’m sure most of its authors would set for works in their field. Specifically, the authors: (1) direct their letter to Michael Sandel, but their disagreement is more properly with their university’s administration (and with similar-minded stakeholders in higher education generally), (2) don’t spend any significant time dealing with the values and interests motivating their opponents to offer this massive online class, and (3) pile their arguments on top of one another in a jumble instead of pulling each issue out for distinct consideration. Philosophically, each of these steps is a misstep, and collectively they threaten to turn the whole enterprise away from reasoning and toward rhetoric. The letter is otherwise well written. If a student majoring in another subject wrote such a piece in an upper level Philosophy class, her professor would likely praise it while noting at the end, “If you were a Philosophy major I would expect a little more from you at points.” A revised version directed toward the San Jose State administration, that dealt thoughtfully and charitably with the administration’s own words and positions, and treated each distinct issue independently would better exemplify Philosophy in practice. It might also lead the letter’s audience and authors alike to a greater understanding of this fraught moment in higher education, and even indicate some ways forward that would make effective use of new instructional technologies while preserving the aspects of the current system most professors would like to retain.

That may be setting the bar too high, but I do think that a more Philosophically rich letter than the one the San Jose Philosophy Department wrote could conceivably have such effects, bringing us at least a glimpse of the deeper truths of this situation rather than, in effect, just saying, “No!” to a perceived threat. Yet in that alternate universe, would anyone read such a letter? And would it persuade anyone who read it?  Those seem to me the relevant questions because the letter that appeared in our own universe is not only “sophisticated” in the three ways I listed, it is also highly effectively  so. By publicly targeting Michael Sandel, dismissing the motivations behind offering this MOOC, and layering their arguments one upon another in an emotionally resonant way, the department created a powerful piece of public persuasion. People are talking about it – at least as much as anyone ever talks about Philosophy departments. The bullet to bite here is this: let’s assume that this trade is necessary, and persuasiveness in this case comes at the cost of Philosophical rigor. Is the trade worth it? And how should we answer that question?

Cut to the house of a friend of a friend down in Portland, Oregon where I attended a barbecue last weekend.

Portlandia isn’t really making anything up.

At one point one of the attendees, a union organizer, told a story about being at a hotel in Washington D.C., realizing that the next hallway was full of demonstrators with, let us say, somewhat different political views from her own, along with their unattended homemade placards and signs, and being sorely tempted to engage in a little sabotage. When her six year old daughter started asking questions about this, she clarified that it’s never right to take someone else’s things without permission – “unless it’s politics,” in which case sabotage can be OK. My first thought was Philosophically smug: as a good Socrates-inflected liberal, I believe in free speech, particularly of the sort I disagree with – since, after all, that’s the only time that belief is tested (Why would I want to suppress speech I agree with?). Then I had my second thought: is that the right attitude for politics? This union organizer runs campaigns. She’s helped people. I still can’t agree with her on this issue of sabotage, but I also sympathize with the people she supports, who want decent wages and some job protections in an iffy economy, and who when faced with the choice between a little more wisdom or a little higher pay probably don’t hesitate long deciding.Go too far down this road toward political expediency and you can justify anything, which surely can’t be right. But do we really need to go all the way in the other direction, putting truth and reasoning and all that jazz ahead of persuasion and effectiveness?

I’ll answer this way: Philosophically the San Jose State Philosophy Department’s letter earns a C. I expect more from Philosophers. But politically it gets an A. I still long for the kind of analysis this group probably could write, that would honor their interests and values while also giving equal attention to the motivations of their opponents, some of whom sincerely want to provide students with good educations – and in the humanities no less – without leaving them with crippling loans. But I also know enough about how higher education makes decisions to know that no one’s waiting around for such analysis to help them make up their minds. I can long for the sort of debate Socrates would lead, but that may just not be feasible. Politics may necessarily be more like sausage-making. And the letter this Philosophy department actually wrote is pretty good sausage. If it earned a Philosophical F, I would reject it on those grounds. But it’s good enough Philosophically to pass, so I will cheer their political coup. Then I’ll root for this situation to work out well for everyone, including the students. Maybe even the orcs.

Picture credit: Jacques-Louis David, UC Santa Cruz, Portland Backyard Chicken Keepers.