12

The Dinner Band on the Cruise Ship of Theseus

MICHAEL F. PATTON, JR.

 

 

 

 

Philosophers have a long history of taking seemingly simple issues and making them very complex. As an example, some of us even call this activity by an overly complex name: Problematizing. To be honest, most of us think we’re actually revealing the deep and interesting complexity that the demands of life have us gloss over, and we think that the world is a better place because of it. However, this can be frustrating for those just starting out and for the old pros as well. As bright a philosophical light as David Hume had a sort of breakdown at the end of his Treatise:

The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me and heated my brain that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to consider myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprives of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium ... and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.¹¹²

When Hume gets to the point where the lunatic has come off the grass and gotten into his head, he cannot carry on anymore. In what follows, I will use some examples from the history and music of Pink Floyd to explore some philosophical puzzles about identity, at least until I get brain damage. After all, the guys who make up Pink Floyd have been performing the songs they wrote together since 1965. I mean, some of them have been performing the songs they wrote and then others later performed those songs and some new songs they wrote after a couple of the first guys left. Along they way, it started sounding different, some members left and came back while others just left and finally they went out of existence. Then they played a concert in 2005, when four of them shared a stage for the first time in twenty-five years. Wait a minute, now I am confused.

Wot’s...Uh the Deal?

Problems of identity across time, or diachronic identity, are as old as philosophy itself. Basically, the question is “When is it true to say that object a at time one is the same object as object b at time two?” Am I the same person as I was when I was twenty? Is the thing I climbed in Paris (Okay, I rode the elevator) the same thing as Monsieur Eiffel built in the second half of the nineteenth century? The story of Theseus’s ship problematizes these questions, all of which have the pre-reflective answer of “Duh ... yes!,” by pointing out that we can describe cases where there are strong reasons to answer “no” or else run afoul of basic logic. Here’s how the argument goes (at least the way it goes in my head):

Theseus leaves port on the Trump Princess, which promptly begins to disintegrate. Luckily, between the hold and the barge he is towing, Theseus has enough spare parts to repair absolutely anything that goes wrong with the ship. Also, being something of an environmentalist, Theseus stows all the damaged and broken parts in the hold or on the towed barge. As bad weather and poor construction standards dog Theseus and his crew throughout the trip, it finally happens that Theseus has rebuilt the Trump Princess entirely, part for part. Trust me, if a knowledgeable seaman does this carefully, it can be accomplished without the ship sinking. (I promise. Really. If you’re worried about all the welding and electrical work and such, fine, I’ll make it Huck and Jim’s raft, but it isn’t nearly as interesting.)

Anyway, Theseus finally makes landfall and starts waxing philosophical: is this the ship that made landfall the same ship as the ship that left port so long ago? To help him think about it, he makes a nearly exact duplicate of his ship in dry-dock out of the salvaged parts. Certainly the salvaged ship has some sort of claim on being the ship of Theseus—it is the collection of atoms (minus a few here and there) that actually did leave the port with Theseus and his crew standing aboard. But, the ship that made landfall has a claim to being the ship of Theseus as well. After all, Theseus and the crew never got wet or jumped to another boat at any point during their trip. At the most they had to step around some “pardon our progress” tape while a certain part of the ship was being repaired. So how can anyone really doubt that there was just one ship that underwent repairs but made the whole journey?

The philosophical problems get worse when you think about animate objects. Our bodies exchange atoms with the environment at an alarming rate. If you drink a sugary beverage while walking, within ten minutes, the carbon in the sugar you ingested will be exhaled as CO₂. Three days from now, more than one=half of the particles that currently compose your liver will be outside your body. And, finally, within a relatively short amount of years, your body will composed of a completely different set of atoms than it is now. So we are all ships of Theseus with a big metaphysical decision to make: do we survive the wholesale exchange of all of our parts, in which case the very appealing doctrine that I am the parts that compose me at any one time is false, or do we say that we do not survive the loss of a part, and thereby say goodbye to the appealing claim that we persist over time?

Decisions, decisions. It’s certainly obvious to me that I am me right now, and since I don’t believe in an immaterial soul or mind, I have to be the things that compose me. But it also seems to me that I was me six years ago, even though almost all of those atoms were dispersed into the biosphere long ago. Neither answer really satisfies me.

There are other moves to make in this debate—one can say that a person’s identity inheres in a nonphysical spirit. Many religious traditions are consistent this view of things. Alternatively, one could adopt the so-called theory of temporal parts—the thesis that enduring objects are four-dimensional things, not three-dimensional things, that have their parts timelessly all at once. These views are oft-debated, and I have discussed the objections I have to these solutions elsewhere.¹¹³

What Do You Want from Me?

Pink Floyd has had many Ship-of-Theseus moments. They’ve changed members, agents, managers, musical styles, fan bases and record companies. So, if we can figure out what the hell is going on with the diachronic identity of Pink Floyd, maybe we can come up with something intelligent to say about diachronic identity in general—for ships, people, bands, and everything under the sun. Then we can all go off and put in Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz at the same time and freak out.

I want to discuss several different ways in which we might identify and then re-identify Pink Floyd. As we shall see, many of these categories overlap in some way or another, and this fact may provide a clue for the resolution of this puzzle that I will finally suggest. For the purposes of this exercise, I will consider five different possible sources of continued identity: Roster Identity, Stylistic Identity, Legal Identity, and Nominal Identity.

Band Roster Identity

What a mess this is. It’s much harder than figuring genealogy, and includes nearly as many petty fights and squabbles as family life.

• For our purposes, the band called Pink Floyd started out with Bob Klose (guitar), Roger Waters (bass), Nick Mason (drums), Rick Wright (wind instruments), and Syd Barrett (guitar and vocals).

• These people were playing together up until the first album was about to be recorded, at which point Klose left the band to pursue photography. The remaining four constituted the band when Piper at the Gates of Dawn was released in 1967.

• Soon after this album began to get noticed, Barrett’s much talked about problems led to the addition of David Gilmour on guitar and vocals.

• In 1968, Barrett left the band for good, and the line-up of Gilmour, Waters, Wright, and Mason remained constant until Wright was fired from the band in 1981 during the recording of The Wall.

• Next, Waters left the band in 1985, but Gilmour and Mason continued recording material as “Pink Floyd,” prompting a lawsuit by Waters (more on this later).

• To cap it all off, in 1987, Wright rejoined the band.

Whew. It would be nice if we could just focus on the group from until 1968 until 1981 when the core four broke up with the departure of Wright. But, some people would not sit still for the exclusion of Piper at the Gates of Dawn from the discography, and I suspect no one would sit still for excluding The Wall, which was not complete when Wright was fired from the group.

Stylistic Identity

Let’s now ask whether the band stays the same even though the style of music it composes and play changes. I think there are real questions here—consider the difference between the early, bluesy Peter-Green-era of Fleetwood Mac (the era in which they wrote and recorded “Black Magic Woman” in nearly the same arrangement that made Carlos Santana a star) and the post-Buckingham-Nicks-era that saw such monster hits as “Dreams” and the Clinton theme song “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” I’d be surprised to find someone who was able to pick these songs as coming from the same band if she was ignorant of the historical facts. An even more interesting (and more difficult) case can arise when we think of individual artists who drastically change their styles. Compare tracks from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Desire, Saved!, Shot of Love, and Love and Theft and tell me that this seems like the same musical entity. It’s made more difficult because we assume it is the same person, Bob Dylan, all the way through (but I’ll get back to this point).

For Pink Floyd, it seems to me that the differences between the early Syd Barrett songs and the later Waters-Gilmour songs are immense. Take the first verse of Barrett’s ode to his cats, “Lucifer Sam”:

Lucifer Sam, Siam cat.
Always sitting by your side
Always by your side.
That cat’s something I can’t explain.

And compare that to the first verse of Waters’s “Money”:

Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you’re okay.
Money, it’s a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four-star daydream,
Think I’ll buy me a football team.

The two could scarcely be more different. One is a drug-addled (or assisted) reverie about one’s pets and, apparently, their litter box (“At night prowling sifting sand ...”), while the other is a dandy (if overplayed) bit of social commentary. Yet both are Pink Floyd classics. The music the band made moved through four fairly distinctive phases: the psychedelic early sound so influenced by Barrett, the “classic” Pink Floyd sound from 1971 to 1975, the Roger Waters era (1976–1985), and the David Gilmour era (1987–1995). As different as the songs from these periods are, they all turn up on the playlist at the weekend Pink Floyd laser shows at the local IMAX theater. What’s really going on here?

Even by the band’s own admission in “Brain Damage,” a change in musical style can trigger dramatic results:

And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon

Well, then, I guess we’re already there.

Legal Identity

From one point of view, the band is a legal entity. They have contracts with one another and the record label that determine, among other things, who gets what portion of the money. When the band changes members, as we have seen them do, the contracts get rewritten and life goes on. This seems pretty cut-and-dried, being all lawyerly and such. But as anyone who has filed a complicated tax return knows, just because something is defined by the law, that doesn’t mean it is simple or even interpreted the same way every time. I recently had a tax attorney advising me on an IRA I had inherited tell me, “Well, Michael, understanding IRA law is more like arguing about art than about adding up columns of numbers.” And so it happens that even when the legally-defined Pink Floyd is under consideration, there are disputes among the constituents of this composite entity. Take, for example, the incident in the late 1980s wherein Roger Waters sued to stop David Gilmour and Nick Mason from using the name “Pink Floyd.” If the individual members of Pink Floyd cannot agree whether the band still exists, what hope have we of deciding? At the end of the day, to the legal system, Pink Floyd is the group that proffers the most convincing argument in court, both in the eyes of the band members and in the eyes of the record labels ¹¹⁴ and the others who own the rights to the music.

Nominal Identity

It’s not even clear that we can settle the seemingly simple issue of what the band’s name even is. The first mention of the words ‘Pink’ and ‘Floyd’ occurred when the original line-up assumed the name “The Pink Floyd Sound” at Syd Barrett’s suggestion. The name was a reference to blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council whom Barrett had read about in the liner notes from a Blind Boy Fuller album. The band performed under that name and the name “Tea Set” for a time, and then settled on “The Pink Floyd.” By the time they released Piper at the Dates of Dawn in 1967, the name had become “Pink Floyd.” Still, David Gilmour referred to the group as “The Pink Floyd” as recently as 1984. To make matters worse, in 1987, even though A Momentary Lapse of Reason was a project headed by David Gilmour and Nick Mason, Roger Waters filed a lawsuit to keep the name “Pink Floyd” from being used. Here’s a case of an original member of the band suing one original member and one non-original member of the band, saying they don’t exist anymore. Gilmour and Moore insisted they did exist as Pink Floyd, and the name lived on as the case was settled out of court. Despite the fact that they recorded one of the best-selling albums of all time in Dark Side of the Moon, I don’t even know if the band members know what they were calling themselves. If they don’t know, how do we have a chance of knowing what they’re called? Let’s just use a definite description—“The band almost everyone refers to as ‘Pink Floyd’” and be done with it.

Wish You Were Here

So what are we to do about all of this? It seems that from every angle, there are problems with the claim that one and the same band, Pink Floyd, existed from 1967 until at least 1987. The line-up, style, name, and legal status of the band all seem unable to square with our intuitions that the band plays on.

Here’s something that might get us out of this quandary. I call it the “Officeholder View” of personal identity. Suppose I am the amateur computer guy in my office. To several people, I am nothing more than that. So long as someone can work on the computers, they are happy. Clearly, it need not be me who is the computer guy for that office to be occupied. Thankfully, many of my relationships occur on a deeper level than the one I just described. I am the only philosopher at my college, I am a colleague to several other faculty members, I advise some student clubs, I am a husband and I am a full time herder of five quite unruly cats. At the moment, I hold all these offices, but that could change. I can easily serve in one office even as I cease serving in another. Were I to become a right-wing republican, I could imagine my wife (truthfully) saying, “You are not the person I married.” Yet even though my wife would rightly impeach me as husband, my Dean would probably not feel the urge—I could (and probably would) be the same philosopher he hired. My department chair might decide I was still able to teach philosophy, but she might bar me from teaching political philosophy. I might get tossed out of my bowling league for political reasons and yet stay accepted by my investment club. In short, the various constituencies I move among are in charge of deciding if I am the same person in the context they socially create and maintain. I simply do not get a vote.

In his moving memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death, Jean-Dominique Bauby gives us a glimpse into this sort of situation from the other side of the looking glass. Bauby writes about his experiences with what is called “locked-in syndrome.” The syndrome is caused in this case by a stroke low in the brain stem. In cases like Bauby’s, the subject is paralyzed to the point of being unable to speak or voluntarily move much of anything at all. But all cognitive function is left intact. In many cases, the ability to blink on command remains, and blinking did, in fact, become Bauby’s means of communication. Visitors would recite the alphabet and stop at the letter that he responded to with a blink, record that letter, and repeat the procedure until a sentence (or enough of one) became clear.

The process gets very confusing and frustrating, especially for the person blinking to communicate. It is like playing charades about everything, but worse because you can’t use the canonical time-saving moves to set context, like pantomiming a movie camera or the reading of a book in particular. Bauby notes that this constriction of communication eventually changed his personality. Before his stroke, he was the editor-inchief of the French-language version of the fashion magazine Elle. He was a witty, urbane socialite who was well known and well liked around Paris. But his paralysis eventually reduced his willingness to try to engage people as he would have in the past, and his ability to think on his feet. “The keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home,” Bauby writes. “By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter.¹¹⁵

For much of his memoir, Bauby describes the fading away of what he takes to be the core elements of his personality, his self, but all the while he calls whatever remains “me.” This rang true when I read it, having lived for thirteen years with a brother in this same condition. My brother Josh went through almost everything Bauby described, and we went though it with him, as we kept him at home.¹¹⁶

With us, however, Josh remained the “same person” for all of those years. But this was not true for other relationships Josh had. These became attenuated as time went by, as Josh’s friends transferred their friendships to my family members or else remained committed to what had been their relationship with Josh before his stroke. It is telling that almost all the discussions returned to events earlier in Josh’s life. This isn’t very surprising, since Josh didn’t do all that much these days, but it was a consistent pattern. To me, Josh remained the same brother and son to his family and to himself, but he slowly ceased to be the same person at all to his former friends and even his fiancée. We chose criteria for sameness of person that let through even the most dramatic changes while everyone else had more finelygrained criteria.

Brain Damage, or Careful with that Axe, Eugene

If you’re skeptical that judgments about when we are (or are not) the same person are usually taken out of our hands, here is another reason why this makes sense:

Suppose I am subject to a series of minor strokes (or axe injuries) that successively incapacitates me. By this death of a thousand cuts, I lose my wit, my peculiar desires, my memories, my vocabulary and so on, up until the extinction of all consciousness.

At each stage of this erosion of what I would now call my self, I would answer, when question by philosophical types, that of course I still existed, that I was still here. This answer would emerge at every level of debilitation (because, I think, of the nature of self-reflexive consciousness), including those at which I could only nod or blink my assent or dissent to the question. But sitting here now, I know that I (now) am not that terribly disabled thing in the description and that I could never be it. My body might come to be in that condition, but here and now I will say it would not be me. As Derek Parfit has argued, when it comes to survival we care much more about higher cognitive functions, memories and dispositions than about the particular body or body parts we have (except those body parts responsible for those mental features).¹¹⁷ So my scenario convinces me that I am not the best judge of whether I have survived a particular event or procedure in any nontrivial way. Maybe we should just say that while my body will construct a self with whatever cognitive resources it has left and consider it the same self as before, even if it has lost its memories of the past, other social groups are often quite properly more selective in this matter.

You could say that this is what happened to Syd Barrett in 1967 and ’68, as, by most accounts, he gradually but definitely lost the attributes and personality characteristics that made him (if people like David Bowie are to be believed) the coolest guy in psychedelic London. For those who saw Syd only sporadically at the time, like Joe Boyd, the founder of the UFO Club and producer of the band’s first single “Arnold Layne,” the axe cuts seemed deep and sudden:

After they’d signed with EMI [and begun recording The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which Boyd did not produce], a few months went by when I didn’t really see much of them at all. But we reached an agreement that no matter what happened, no matter how big they were, they agreed that they would come back in June ’67 and play the UFO Club. And sure enough, by June they were huge. There were queues around the block and crowds outside the club and everything. And there was no stage entrance, so the group had to come in through the crowd to perform. So I saw them up close as they came by, and I kind of greeted them as they came in. I said hello to everybody, and Syd was the last one in.

That’s when Boyd’s own criteria for sameness of person led him to immediately recognize Syd as another person altogether:

And Syd, I would have to say, was a very, very different person that night in June from when I had seen him previously. He was very vacant-eyed, didn’t really say anything. But he had always been very witty, made under-his-breath little sarcastic comments and funny little comments here and there. But none of that, that night. And when he went on stage, he just stood there, for long stretches, while the rest of the band played. It was very awkward and very disturbing to see.¹¹⁸

While idioms like “You’re not yourself tonight” do convey the fact that a person is behaving atypically, Boyd does seem to be claiming real difference of person in this case. For Waters, Wright, Mason, and the band’s management who saw Syd from day to day, he seemed to slip away more slowly but, sadly, inexorably. From their point of view, the final cut (so to speak) was not another step in Syd’s sad degeneration. For there was no point at which Syd could suddenly no longer play guitar or write songs (as his solo albums and occasional performances in the early 1970s prove). Rather, the final cut—the moment when Syd Barrett, member of Pink Floyd, ceased to be that person—occurred in February 1968 when the other members of the band decided it had occurred. “In the car on the way to collect Syd,” for a show in Southhampton, Nick Mason remembers, “someone said ‘Shall we pick up Syd?’ and the response was ‘No, fuck it, let’s not bother.’”¹¹⁹ Barrett, his friends, his bandmates and his family members no doubt used different criteria to judge sameness of person, and the band’s criteria told them that there was no more Syd Barrett. As the office holder view of identity would have it, Syd didn’t have a vote.

The Show Must Go On

So this is the position I suggest for our understanding of Pink Floyd: instead of insisting on a material criterion for identity, which could reside only in band roster, or some abstract criterion such as style, we should say that Pink Floyd is an office best understood along the lines of this officeholder view of identity. More properly it is a collection of offices, each filled or not by different people and their songs. To the die-hard fan of one sort, The Pink Floyd Sound is the same band that recorded all the other albums in the Pink Floyd discography. To another sort of fan, the real Pink Floyd is the band that had the run of albums that began with Dark Side of the Moon and ended with The Wall. To a third fan, Pink Floyd is the psychedelic band that ended when Barrett’s influence finally wore off. And there are many other sorts of fans, each of whom is right in their context.

In the extreme case, Pink Floyd could be as long-lived as the Dresden Staatskapelle, the world’s oldest orchestra. Founded in 1548, it has been composed of a host of different musicians, but still endures by our standards. While this is not as often the case with rock ’n’ roll, The Grateful Dead shuffled many musicians through their ranks until Jerry died, and there is no reason to think he could not be replaced (whatever Deadheads might say) in principle.

What is the relevance of this reasoning to Pink Floyd? Just this: it looks like we have no way to comfortably say that one single thing lasted from 1967 until 1987 and that that thing was the band Pink Floyd. However, we can identify many different constituencies who will answer “yes” to such questions as “Is the band who released A Momentary Lapse of Reason the same band who recorded Ummagumma?” and that there are some (like Roger Waters) who will answer no. And similarly, I think we can handle just about any question that arises about the history of “the band,” so long as we pay close enough attention to context and the interests of the parties involved. As for getting context- and value judgment-free answers, there aren’t any, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all get along.

Absolutely Curtains

At this point, I’ve just got to stop thinking about all of this and go back to my simple, unreflective account. Pink Floyd is the band whose name appears on the spine of several of my CD’s in the “P” section of my collection. I like them, and listen to them when I am in specific moods. And that’s that, at least so long as I make sure that the lunatic is no longer in my head.¹²⁰