Are We Still Here

It’s not always clear when I’m in my own city and when I’m not.  On my way home from work, or out and about with my wife and daughter, I find myself skirting the city limits and I often wonder, “am I still in my city?”

This question makes me think about an engaging problem in modern philosophy known as The Problem of the Many.  The problem poses the following question: how do you define an object that does not have clearly distinguished borders?  How do you define fuzzy things? 

In his 1993 essay “Many, but Almost One,” the philosopher David Lewis uses a cloud as an illustrative means of presenting the puzzle.  Think of a cloud, Lewis instructs.  From the ground, the cloud appears to be one object with a clear, outlined boundary.  On closer inspection, however, the cloud is a mere collection of many individual water droplets; its edges are vague, indistinguishable and not as apparent (if at all obvious) as you at first concluded.  

Now, imagine – hovering there in midair – that you flick one water droplet from the cloud’s edge down to earth.  Without that single drop of water, are you left with the same cloud?  Flick away another droplet.  Still the same cloud?  Do this again and again (and again…) until eventually you are left with a single water droplet: is that single droplet the same cloud?  If it is, were you in fact gazing up from the ground at many small clouds and not just the one you thought?  And if not, at which point did the one cloud cease being what you thought was a single object drifting through the sky? 

Western Washington University’s philosophy professor Hud Hudson surveys many attempts to answer The Problem of the Many with wonderful clarity in his book A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person.  Hudson, however, applies the problem to human persons. How do we identify the “person,” Hudson inquires, among the world’s fuzzy material pieces?  Greater than the solutions to the puzzle Hudson presents is his ability to persuade us that The Problem of the Many is a problem that needs an answer.  We need to know who we are.   

The Problem of the Many aptly applies to the way we understand our community.  How do we define the community in which we live?  An easy answer lies on a city map.  That answer, however, is not very meaningful (or interesting for that matter).  Rather, the bigger question that is filled with meaning is how do we define the rich sense of community that we think of as our town? 

In Hudson’s words, there are “Many Problematic Solutions to the Problem of the Many.”  But simply thinking about the issues it poses – regardless of the ultimate answers reached – reveals deeper truths about how we define our community and how we live in it.  Understanding the characteristics of our community enables us to salvage essential aspects of the community that might otherwise fade without our noticing. Likewise, we can nourish those fledgling features of our growing community that promise to define, for the better, our communities of tomorrow. Either way, just asking the question, “where are the margins of our community?,” keeps us from falling off its edge.