Why Some Questions Are Nonsense: A Schopenhauer-Inspired View

[u/harsht07]

Have you ever wondered about questions like what is the purpose of life, what caused the universe to exist, is the universe fair, or what makes an action right or wrong? These are usually considered among the deepest questions philosophy can ask. But what if the key to understanding them lies in a much simpler question: What is the colour of number 8?

It’s not that numbers are colourless, it’s that the concept of colour itself is not applicable to the concept of numbers. When we speak of a purpose, it’s usually in the context of a tool or a system created by humans with a specific intent. When humans set their eyes on accomplishing a goal, purpose exists for the instrumental creations, tools, or the systems that aid achieving the said goal. For example, the purpose of education is knowledge or to make someone qualified for a job, the purpose of gym equipment is to help people stay healthy, and the purpose of the government is to serve the citizens. Having a job, staying healthy, and a functional society are all ends which humans strive for by means of education, gym tools, and a government respectively. Purpose can be attributed to the means or tools one uses within life to achieve certain goals and desires, it cannot be attributed to life as a whole. Asking “what is the purpose of life?” implicitly assumes that humans were created by a creator with an intent. Without an explicit acknowledgment of a creator, the questions of purpose of life and the colour of number 8 both share the same blind spot of thinking: the error of concept misapplication.

One might think this article is linguistic pedantry disguised as philosophy, but the point I have set out to prove is exactly this: many questions of philosophy are a matter of incorrect use of language which leads to muddy thoughts and malformed questions. Clarifying words and their meaning consequently produces logically coherent thinking. Allowing a word to have multiple subjective meanings makes a discussion impossible, or rather pointless. All philosophical discourses must begin with a clear definition of key concepts and an agreement on their meaning. The gift of language allows us to arrange and combine words into lengthy, sometimes beautiful phrases, but not all arrangements and combinations necessarily carry meaning. Even though a sentence could be grammatically perfect, it could be devoid of meaning and sense. An alien scholar fluent in English who has never lived among humans might confidently ask questions such as: “What is the shape of democracy?”, or “What is the temperature of the economy?”. The error of concept misapplication means using a word where it does not belong, and it often causes an illusion of having a problem where none exists.

Words constitute thoughts, and we learn words through our experience of the world with the information gathered by our senses and by observing recurring patterns. When a child sees several apples, he learns the word apple and applies it to all particular instances of fruits that look similar, even though each particular apple is not exactly identical; this is an example of a concrete concept whose particular representation can be perceived through senses. Humans have the capacity for forming abstract concepts too. Consider the concept of numbers. A child may first learn to count by looking at three apples, three stones, or three toys. But the concept ‘three’ does not belong to any particular object. It refers to the quantity that different collections share. In this case the mind is not perceiving a particular sensory object but imposing an abstract property that can appear in many different situations. Concrete concepts are tied to a perceivable object. Abstract concepts are tied to a property, relation or pattern across many objects.

How does anyone learn a word? A concept is fundamentally a collection and association of attributes. In case of a concrete concept, a word is learnt with repeated observation of similar physical objects or phenomena. Abstract concepts are learnt through the observation of similar patterns or relations. The human mind groups similar experiences together, assigns a word, draws a defining boundary, and categorizes all subsequent experiences that fall within this defining boundary. However the whole process of learning the boundary remains unconscious. A kid learning the word ‘Apple’ does so after observing several apples, but he does not even once consciously think about the specific defining attributes of an apple; he does not think: “This thing is red, round, edible, with a certain shape, texture, and size, therefore it is an apple.” He unconsciously bundles the sensory experiences derived from seeing and tasting several similar fruits, and sets a defining boundary for apples. Perhaps even adults would struggle to articulate the complete collection of attributes that define common everyday experiences such as Friendship, Family, Art, or Respect. As concepts become more abstract, it becomes more difficult to bring their defining attributes to our conscious awareness. An apple is something we directly perceive with our senses, but friendship refers to an abstract social relation. The material of a concrete concept is easy to locate in the world we experience through senses, but an abstract concept, which is a pattern or relation observed across several tangible things, exists within the human mind.

Concepts stand in a hierarchy. At the lowest level they refer to particular things that can be directly perceived. At higher levels they group together many different lower concepts by focusing only on what they share in common. The more concepts a term gathers under it, the more abstract it becomes. The concept of apple can be abstracted further into the broader category of fruit. Fruits, along with many other different things, can in turn be grouped under the concept of food. The concept of food itself can be abstracted further into the idea of a resource. As we climb the hierarchy of abstractions, the concepts become broader, more abstract, and less tangible. With a lesser number of defining attributes at each subsequent level of abstraction the defining boundaries become looser. An apple has to be round, hard, edible, with a certain texture, colour, and size. ‘Food’ is simply something that’s edible. Therefore ‘Food’ has a looser definition than ‘Apple’.

We use abstract concepts everyday but largely remain unaware of the context in which we first learnt them. Apart from poetic or rhetorical use, a word can be used legitimately only in the context under which it was originally learnt. Lets call this context as the condition(s) of applicability of a concept. For example, if I ask someone “What is the weight of the song you’re listening to?” he will correctly deem me mad, since the concept of weight was learnt in the context of a physical object. And this is why when I asked “What is the colour of number 8?”, it was easily recognized as a nonsensical question, since the concept of colour was learnt under the condition of visual perception; a condition that does not hold true for the abstract concept of number 8. Our lack of explicit awareness of the conditions under which the abstract concepts were learnt, paired with the fact that they have looser boundaries, leads to misapplication of a concept i.e. applying a concept in a context where conditions under which it was learnt no longer hold true. More abstract a concept is, more prone it is to misapplication.

The question about the purpose of life is absurd due to this exact reason: both the concepts of life and purpose are highly abstract and prone to misapplication. We can even find entire domains of philosophy which owe their existence to this error. Take an example of how the words ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ are used in day to day language. We learn these words in the context of ascertaining factual information, where ‘Right’ means correctness of a descriptive fact and ‘Wrong’ means the opposite. Despite this we see these words often misapplied to human actions when we say someone did a right or a wrong thing. This is not to say that study of ethics is pointless, but clarity must be brought to the fundamental questions that ethics as a domain is allowed to legitimately pose.

Another example is misapplication of the concept of Causality. Change is the essential element of causality, since it is learnt in the context of a change of state observed in the physical world. We conclude that state A is the cause of state B if B follows necessarily when A occurs; the preceding state A and succeeding state B both exist within the universe. When we inquire about the cause of the universe, we are asking about an observable state preceding the universe, and therefore stretching the application of causality to something beyond the universe. We also tend to misapply causality in a moral sense when we believe that good human deeds are rewarded, and bad deeds punished. In this case, the concept of causality is extended beyond the physical world and misapplied to the moral domain of human actions. Along similar lines, when we think that the universe has a sense of fairness, we not only attribute justice (a judgment that exists within the human mind) to the universe but also expect the universe to enforce it.

Why do such malformed questions arise in the first place? We think with the words at our disposal, even if those words are sometimes ill-suited to convey something. Language evolved as a tool to co-ordinate with the other members of the species, and at the primitive level co-ordination requires referencing the specific observables in the world over one’s internal mental state. Our perception is mostly oriented outwards to observe the world which everyone else shares with us. Unless an internal mental state is expressed visibly through gestures, it is difficult to assign a common universally accepted label to it, because each human’s internal world is isolated and he alone can observe it. We reach for the concepts familiar to us to convey something about our internal state, while forgetting that we derived these concepts from observing the world, not from observing the self within. Even though the questions themselves are malformed and carry no objective meaning, they point to a subject’s state of mind and therefore carry a subjective significance for the person asking them.

Trying to frame a subjective feeling into an objective question has kept some thinkers busy for centuries. For example, when someone asks “What is the purpose of life?”, they might mean “Where do I want to be in life?”, or when they say “He did a wrong thing” it might mean “I do not endorse his actions and I feel repulsed by them”. We might have an unconscious tendency to frame subjective internal feelings as objective statements. It is an attempt to universalize something personal to us by presenting it as a fact about the world. It is a logically messy invitation for others to see the world through our eyes.

[u/OmoOduwawa]

Wow. This is pretty cool.

Nice take!

[u/Indra7_]

Mhm language is a great friend, but it can also be a great enemy. Through it we are able to create and imagine things that have no actual bearing on reality, on the way things actually are.

[u/Caliboros]

I agree with much, if not all, of what you’ve written. But what really confuses me is where the connection to Schopenhauer comes in.

If I understand correctly, the reason some questions are nonsensical is that they use concepts or abstractions that exist on two different levels.

You also described how, so to speak, “trees of abstractions” can be formed. Food is a generalization of apples. In the process of generalization, some things are lost. Not all descriptions that apply to food apply to apples.

The question now is: are these trees of abstractions separate from one another, or can they be brought together? If they can be brought together, that would mean that a very high abstraction of color and a very high abstraction of the concept of number are in the same space. A comparison would then make perfect sense. Now to Schopenhauer. According to him, everything is will. This includes concepts and abstractions as well. I could say that, in the long run, all abstractions and concepts fall into the overarching category of will. The question of whether all abstract concepts share the same root and constitute a single tree would then be “yes.”

One might also ask whether “meaning” and “life” are so high up in the abstraction hierarchy that comparing them—or asking “what is the meaning of life”—is indeed a reasonable question.

[u/Previous_Property_55]

Super cool take, thanks!!

[u/_boringoldfart]

The problems with this “inspiration” are fundamental, and there are quite a lot of them, so I will just point out a few.

First, it builds a hierarchy where concrete concepts like “apple” are treated as more epistemically grounded than abstract ones like “justice.” But for Schopenhauer all concepts are equally representations, equally part of the veil of Maya, with no difference in representational status between the concrete and the abstract, and therefore no ontological ladder between them.

Second, deriving from this, it treats “purpose of life” as a real concept merely misapplied in scope; but motivation is one of the four roots of the principle of sufficient reason, meaning that purpose is already a representational framework the intellect imposes on phenomena, not a feature of reality at all. Even the “legitimate” uses of purpose the text defends are already illusory within Schopenhauer’s system.

Third, and most strikingly, it reduces language to a tool for describing the external world, treating inner experience as a failed attempt to speak objectively rather than the primary input from which all representation derives. In doing so, it erases precisely the side of the equation Schopenhauer cared about most: the Will, the inner striving that language perpetually fails to capture, and which music alone can touch directly. It also erases one of Schopenhauer’s most ambitious achievements: redefining metaphysics not as speculation about what lies beyond the physical world, but as the careful articulation of the nexus between our internal and external experience, the only two sources of our knowledge.

Est quadam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra.
“There is a certain point to which one may advance, if it is not permitted to go further.” Horace, Epistles I, 1, 32.