Thor and Hamilton

What can characters tell us about the world?

For the next few weeks I will be reading through some of the early works of Jacques Derrida and discussing them with my dear friend, Robert. In preparation for this, I have had occasion to return to the work of John Searle, and particularly his 1958 essay, “Proper Names.” Revisiting this paper got my mind working in a lot of different directions, and I figured I would share some of them here.

What follows is not meant to be a technical engagement with Searle or Derrida, or with linguistic philosophy. If folks are interested in that, I can point you to some sources and backgrounders.

1.

In the paper, Searle mentions that certain proper names point to actual objects and persons in the world. So we could talk about “Mount Everest” or “Dartmouth” as names that refer to actual places in our shared geography. At the same time, however, we could use proper names like “Narnia” or “Wonderland.” These proper names function—that is, they can be used in meaningful ways—but they don’t connect us to any places that exist or have ever existed.

So this is an interesting takeaway: A name (even a proper name) is not required to connect in any way to anything that exists. And by “exist” here I might mean something like “something extended within or measurable within the world we share together.” That’s not an ironclad definition, but it gives us a bit of working room to ge started.

Sticking with place names, we can understand that there is a distinction between a name like “Mount Everest” (connecting somehow to a place that exists) and “Mount Doom” (connecting in some way to a place that does not exist). Let’s not be too strict with these distinctions at the moment. I’m using them in a somewhat loose way. But hopefully you get the feel for the interesting bit, namely, that concepts like existence or actuality don’t really factor into whether a name can name, or a word can word. Meaning seems to keep functioning just fine, despite the words and names we use not having any necessary connection to things in the shared world.

2.

Searle ends up talking quote a bit about the Greek god Zeus in the paper. Something that he points out repeatedly is that Zeus does not exist, and has never existed. Let’s explore this for a moment.

Zeus (name) points to Zeus (referent), but the referent of Zeus is not an actual subject that has ever existed. So let’s note that Zeus here is a “non-subject” in the world, a barred subject. Thus we might write this weird string of connections out like this:

Zeus (name) —> Zeus (referent) that maps to the world thus: Zeus (subject)

or, to simplify things somewhat:

Zeus (n) —> Zeus (r) : Zeus ($)

This is just a symbolic way of saying that Zeus is imaginary. Now, I want to be careful, because what I am doing here looks suspiciously like symbolic logic, or something from Jacques Lacan. I’m not trying to accomplish anything nearly on. the technical scale as either of those options. I’m just doing a little sketch to help me think about this. The symbols and such here are a rough draft, nothing more.

We can then contrast this with another proper name, and in this case it might be a proper name that maps to an extant person. Say, Anna Kendrick, perhaps. She’s got a name, like Zeus has a name. Unlike Zeus, however, the referent of this name maps to an actual subject. So we might symbolize these relations like this:

Anna Kendrick (n) —> Anna Kendrick (r) : Anna Kendrick (S)

This is just a symbolic way of saying that “Anna Kendrick” is not imaginary. The proper name “Anna Kendrick” maps to a referent Anna Kendrick that exists as a subject in our shared world.

So far so good.

3.

Saying “Zeus is imaginary” is just another way of asserting that Zeus has never existed in the way that rocks or butterflies or living persons have existed in the world.

Saying this, however, is not to denigrate the usefulness of Zeus, nor the impact of Zeus. Attentive readers might have noticed that this arrangement of symbols for Zeus is eerily similar to the way that Immanuel Kant regarded the concepts of space and time. To wit:

Space (n) —> Space (r) : Space ($)

Time (n) —> Time (r) : Time ($)

Which is to say that “space” and “time” do not exist, in the manner that rocks and butterflies and living persons exist. Space and time are fully constructs of “the mind.” They are irreducibly fictional.¹ We create them by assuming a non-empirical continuity of dissociated sense data (recall that it was David Hume’s arguments in this matter about matter that got Kant revved up in the first place).

And yet, while they are fictions, space and time are not fictions of a singular, individual mind. They are not just fictions for me, or fictions of my imagination. Rather, these concepts transcend the limits of a singular mind and somehow manage to be part of a shared narrative that functions in a shared world, and accomplishes things in a social manner.

4.

Let me give a crude example of what I mean (and what I think Kant means).

Say we’re both standing in the kitchen, and at some point, I grab the sponge from the side of the sink and throw it at your head. Noticing this, you duck, and the sponge hits the wall, splattering in a sloppy mess of suds.

What just happened?

Somehow, without getting hit in the head with the sponge, you saw yourself getting hit, somewhere in the near future, and you figured out what kind of movements it would take to make sure that particular future didn’t happen. Other than the sponge moving through the air, none of these factors are real events. They don’t exist in themselves; they exist only as possibilities.

And yet these imaginary possibilities are real enough that you took the proper actions needed to keep them from ever existing. Once you duck out of the way, there is no way to get back to that world where you might have been hit in the head at that moment with that particular sponge. There may be other moments, with other sponges, but this one is now in the past.

5.

Let’s take a brief detour into modal conditions. At the moment I am throwing the sponge, the two of us are at a very simple cleft point in the universe we share. Based on the next few seconds, at minimum two possibilities emerge:

/ You are hit with the sponge | You are not hit with the sponge /

A modal case describes conditions about the world that could have been otherwise. Unlike nomological claims about the world (you can’t have a square triangle; you can’t have a married bachelor), modal claims map to the decision points in our social interactions. You likely make thousands, if not millions, of modal interactions in a day.

When we speak definitively about modal cases, we can only ever be speaking about the past. When we make these definitive statements, moreover, there is always an implied statement that accompanies the assertion we are making: but it could have been otherwise. For example:

• The Allies won World War II, but it could have been otherwise.

• I ate cereal this morning, but it could have been otherwise.

• I was born in a set of conditions that allow me to take the title “American citizen,” but it could have been otherwise.

Somehow, you were able to see the arc of my arm, and the movement of the sponge, and you were able to use that data in the present to anticipate where that sponge was likely to be in the future. Using that imagined knowledge about a possible world (a world that does not yet exist, and that, if you react swiftly, will never exist)

6.

If space and time were only figments of my imagination, or of your imagination, there is no way that any of this arrangement that I have been describing above would work. In my throwing the sponge at your head, we both are participating in something. Now, that something is a set of fictions, but the fictions function in a way that allows us to get a heck of a lot of things done in the shared world.

I say these are “fictions” for a couple of reasons that are a bit too complicated to get into here, but they have to do with how Kant thought about the events “out there” in the world (what he called the noumena) and the way those events exist “in us” by means of our perceptions (what he called the phenomena). Using this distinction, space and time are purely phenomenal (they are not connected to anything “out there” among the noumena) and yet these concepts seem to be shared between us.

But even sidestepping the more technical aspects of Kant, we can understand that these are fictions in the simple sense that they are referring to a state of affairs that doesn’t exist, precisely because the event in questions didn’t happen (to wit: you didn’t get hit in the head with a wet sponge).

There’s a lot more to say about this, but for now, I just want to reiterate the point that fictions of this sort can be very functional and very powerful in our daily lives.

7.

As I was going back over these references to Zeus in the Searle paper, I kept thinking about the character of Hamilton in the musical Hamilton by Lin Manuel Miranda. This adds some interesting wrinkles to this chain of thought.

First, in the musical, Hamilton is a character. That is, he is a fictional person within the fictional diegesis of the play. Diegesis here is a fancy word for “everything that goes on within the plot and story-world of a narrative.” For example, if two characters put a record on a turntable and listen to a song, that’s diegetic, because it is happening to them in a way that they can hear and be affected by.

In contrast, the orchestral score of the film, in most cases anyway, is non-diegetic. The characters don’t hear those musical cues and themes, we do. They are within the narrative frame, and we’re outside that frame, observing what goes on inside it.

At the same time, however, Hamilton is a character based on a persona that actually existed in our shared world. So here the proper name “Hamilton” seems to be doing a double mapping. We might try to write it symbolically like this:

Hamilton (name) —> Hamilton (character) : Hamilton (Subject) —> Hamilton (referent) : Hamilton (Subject)

or, again

Hamilton (n) —> Hamilton © : Hamilton ($) —> Hamilton (r) : Hamilton (S)

8.

So when Hamilton © says something from the stage in the musical, we might rightly ask, “Is Hamilton © : ($) speaking for Hamilton (r) : (S)?” That is, when we are seeing this character on the stage, is this somehow presenting, producing, or reproducing some event or state of interactions that occurred in the past in our shared world? Or is Hamilton © : ($) obscuring our access to Hamilton (r) : (S) by presenting us with a more attractive fiction, which tempts us away from these actual events?

You will notice that the proper name, Hamilton (n), does not give us any guidance here, because that name gathers up all these possibilities and encompasses them with equal hospitality. This is one of the features of Searle’s notion of proper names (and in this, he is similar to other thinkers like Frege and Kripke), in that a proper name can contain both truths and falsehoods about the subject being named. Moreover, there is no magic or minimum number of truths that you have to hit for the name to work.

As such, we have this weird suspension that overtakes us when we watch the musical Hamilton, featuring the character Hamilton, who is somehow referencing, directly of obliquely, the once-living person Hamilton. We are watching the modal in real time: this is literally a manifestation of the idea that the events of Hamilton (S) might have been otherwise, in that the great orator and writer Hamilton (S) might have been the great rapper and hip hop stylist Hamilton ($). Put another way, we are invited to gaze upon Hamilton ($) and see Hamilton (S) when we do, even though what is mapped here is a disjunction, not a conjunction.

9.

Can Hamilton ($) tell us something true or useful about Hamilton (S)? It seems as if this is the case, as weird as that may sound when we actually slow down what is happening. Hamilton © is not Hamilton (S), but is undeniably the Hamilton that has never existed, Hamilton ($). Therefore Hamilton © cannot be Hamilton (r). That is, the proper name is referring to something other than the referent of the name; by showing us the character, the proper hame points us away from the man who lived. To wit:

Hamilton © is not Hamilton (r), because Hamilton ($) cannot be Hamilton (S).

… yet each is gathered in the hospitality of the proper name, Hamilton (n).

It gets weirder when we understand that someone bearing their own proper name, such as Lin Manuel Miranda or Anna Kendrick, makes their living in part by stepping into this confusion around the proper name, and donating their voice and vitality to the fiction. They donate their (S) to the ($) of whatever character they play.

Hence we might say that:

Lin Manuel Miranda (S) : [Hamilton (n) —> Hamilton © : Hamilton ($) —> Hamilton (r) : Hamilton (S)]

For the period of the performance, Miranda inhabits the proper name of Hamilton, but not merely as Hamilton ©, because Hamilton © entails the paradox of Hamilton ($) and Hamilton (S) through the ambiguous referent of the proper name (again, Searle, Frege, and Kripke’s various ways of asserting that the proper name can contain falsehoods and misplaced facts about the referent and still function).

10.

A couple of final thoughts. One of my favorite moments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe come in Infinity War, when Thor tells the Guardians of the Galaxy that they have to go to the planet Nidavellir. Frustrated, one of the Guardians, Drax, shouts, “That’s a made up word!” Thor then responds, “All words are made up.”

The first reason that I like this is because, in this simple exchange, Thor is telling us something profoundly true about the world and about our languages. “All words are made up” is the kind of assertion that hits you with its clarity: you may have never thought about it before, but once it is spoken, its self-evident nature remains with you,

The second reason I like this is because this truth is being told to me by a work of fiction. Thor is a character—we might write him as Thor © here—and unlike Hamilton, he maps to no referent of existence. Thor © is not based on a flesh and blood person, but rather, like Zeus, Thor maps to a non-entity. Thor in the movies is based on Thor in the comic books that is based on Thor in a set of Norse mythologies. In other words,

Thor (n) —> Thor © —> Thor (r) : Thor © —> Thor (r) : Thor ($)

Thor remains bound up in a chain of imaginative fictions, and yet he can (through the actor playing him) utter something that bears profound and lasting truth: “All words are made up.”

In this sense, we see a mechanism for deriving useful truth from pure fiction, and I think that’s interesting.

11.

As a result of all this careful teasing out of actual and unreal subjects, and the ways in which characters can (and cannot) bring us truths in the shared world, an uncomfortable question arises:

What do we do with God?

1. In a different setting, I might say that space and time are strong fictions.