It Depends On What You Mean By "Is"

When someone asks me if I believe that God exists I am likely to get a faraway look in my eyes because I’m wishing I were far away. I’ve given up on the smart-aleck approach of saying, “I’m not even sure I exist, let alone God,” and am more likely to say something about trying not to think about God as a thing, even the best and most powerful thing, but rather as the underlying reason that all things exist. Problem with this is that it gets an equally glassy-eyed stare in response, as the interlocutor begins to wish that they were somewhere far away as well. That’s one solution to the problem.

But it struck me today (after a nap) that it might be useful to ask, “What is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony?” Is it the sequence of thoughts and procedures that bubbled up in the particular brain of Beethoven many years ago? Is it that precious autograph manuscript in the Berlin State Library, the first musical score to be added to the United Nations World Heritage List? (And what does it mean to be added to the list? — physically attached to it with staples? in a box with the other documents with a label on front? or simply virtually included by the mere act of being listed?) Or is it the activity of scraping upon, pumping air through, and beating things with sticks, undertaken by a small army of people watching a man waving his hands to coordinate their activity? Just that once, when the deaf Beethoven did it with a group of focused musicians, or at every performance since by varying conductors and ensembles in many different places and times? Or is it the vibrations in the air made by all that scraping, pumping and beating? Or the results of those vibrations hitting my eardrums (and lots of other people’s eardrums) and producing nervous sensations that my brain finds pleasing (but some other brains may find humdrum or boring)? Is it these sensations? Or is it the grooves on the vinyl disk or the pocks on the metalized plastic disc, or the codes that generate them, or the unpacking and interpretation of the codes or grooves into air vibrations again? Or is it all of these things? If any is lacking, does that change its isness? Did it exist eternally in some platonic realm only read off and interpreted by the mind of Beethoven? Or does it only come to be when someone is listening or performing, like that sorry tree in a forest that only makes a sound if someone hears it?

And ultimately, are these something like the kind of questions we need to ask if we are to get even the slightest touch of the hem of the garment of Who God Is?

Happy New Year.
Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

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