Plutarch Dies in the End

Plutarch, the Ship of Theseus, the Grandfather's Axe, and John Dies in the End

Wallowing in my own self-pity last night due to the continued presence of my runny nose, cough, and stuffed-up sinuses from this damned sickness I’ve had, I sought out a horror film to watch alone and in the dark.

I came upon John Dies in the End while searching through my Netflix queue. I had added said film because it sounded promising, though I couldn’t recall having ever seen a trailer or read any reviews. So I jumped to the ol’ Google and found the film’s trailer to be enticing [note: after writing this, I then read the book and it’s sequel and have re-read them several times — this piece is from 11 years ago (more on that at the bottom of the piece)].

The film is definitely worth a watch for anyone who enjoys comedic horror, but I’m not offering a review of the film here. Rather, I’m writing this because of one interesting part of the film: the prologue.

The opening of the film presents a simple thought experiment in a not-so-simple and enjoyably quirky way:

What do you think? Is it the same axe?

If you’re anything like me, the first answer that comes to your mind is an obvious “no”. The axe has been completely re-constructed, so the original parts that were used to behead the now-rotting, corpsified zombie-dude are no longer in your possession and are most likely just adding to the mass of waste at some local landfill.

However, that’s not the reason that I think the answer of “no” is astoundingly obvious. Hopefully you saw that the primary reason that the answer to the question is “no” is because what slew Swastika-Tongue in the first place was one, some, or all of the eight bullets that you had shot him with before using the axe to remove his head after he became a zombie (like I said, it’s a simple riddle).

However, if you take away the obvious answer and just allow yourself to assume that the real question of the riddle is whether or not the axe you now hold in your hand in the presence of Zombie-Swastika-Tongue is the same one that you had used the previous winter to remove the head of his former self, then you have another riddle that is really a re-hash of a much older thought experiment: The Ship of Theseus.

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment proposed by Plutarch in the first century C.E. It goes something like this:

The ship in which the hero Theseus and the young Athenian men returned from Crete (see the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur) was honored by Athenians and kept in good repair in the harbor of Athens for many centuries. Over time, as parts of the ship would degrade, they were slowly replaced, so eventually there were not many of the original parts of the ship remaining. The question then became “Is the ship, after replacing part for part over time, still the Ship of Theseus?”

The thought experiment, as it stands, really questions the value an object has based upon its parts. It’s a question of philosophical identity.

There are other versions of this thought experiment. Some of them predate Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus. For instance, there is a version in which Socrates and Plato each slowly exchanged the parts of their carriages such that the parts that once were in Plato’s carriage have been completely replaced with parts from Socrates’ carriage and vice versa and then the question is posited as to whether Plato is now using Socrates’ carriage or if he’s still in his own.

Other variants of the thought experiment have come since the time of Plutarch (with some interesting additions).

The version that appears most similar to the prologue from John Dies at the End is the one known as “My Grandfather’s Axe”:

My grandfather had an axe which he gave to my father. My father replaced the haft before giving the axe to me. I had to replace the head. Do I still have my grandfather’s axe?

One of the more interesting variants of this thought experiment was proposed by Thomas Hobbes, the 1700’s English philosopher and author of Leviathan.

Hobbes’ addition to the thought experiment works this way:

You have the Ship of Theseus. You slowly take one piece of the ship off and replace it with a new piece. The old piece you keep. You continue in this manner, replacing pieces of the ship and saving the removed pieces. As this is happening over time, you take the pieces that had been removed and use those pieces to build a new ship, of exactly the same structure and design. By the time you have replaced the final original piece of the ship, you now have two identical ships. Which one is the Ship of Theseus?

Here’s a fantastic breakdown of the original Ship of Theseus thought experiment and the Hobbes’ version from Wireless Philosophy:

The thesis of Joseph Butler, as reviewed in that video and suggesting that “objects persist in only a loose and popular sense”, seems like a nice way to shrug off the problem as not being a problem in the first place.

Btw, this is usually a fun approach to a lot of philosophy problems since a lot of the time it seems like there’s no resolution to a lot of philosophy problems, and, one way or another, we need to find a way to keep going about our day without letting them get to us.

But there’s a bit more that these related puzzles of The Ship of Theseus, My Grandfather’s Axe, and the prologue from John Dies at the End have for us to ponder.

The reason I like these thought experiments, be it after replacing axe parts following your unexplained need to slay and behead some dude with a swastika tattooed on his tongue or replacing pieces of Theseus’ ship, is because they question the concept of identity. We can take these lines of reason beyond simple objects like ships and axes and apply them to concepts like “home” (is it still your home if you haven’t lived there for a long time?) or to our own individuality (are you ever the same person you were in your past?).

We are constantly shedding cells and gaining new ones, so are we ever identical with who we were previously? Darth Vader was almost fully replaced by mechanical parts, so was he still Anakin Skywalker?

The philosopher Wittgenstein might have thought these questions were balderdash (“Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing”) and, if that were the case, he might have been right.

Of course, we could just say that something is such because some consensus of people agree to call it such, and not think much more on it.

Maybe the Ship of Theseus is really just whatever anyone decides to call “the Ship of Theseus”. Maybe Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker because someone calls him so. If that were the case, then the answer to the thought experiment as proposed in John Dies at the End might be that the axe you’re holding in your hand is the same axe as the one that beheaded Swastika-Tongue because his zombie has now said that it is the same axe (it might be a good conclusion since chances are you should be more worried about dealing with said zombie before considering philosophical puzzles anyway).

However, it might still feel like the answer would be “no”.

Even if you had killed the dude with an axe in the first place (and not with one, some, or all of those eight bullets), the original axe has been completely replaced. The answer might feel like “no” because none of the original axe remains and there are only two major parts of the axe to replace. When the problem is introduced as in the case of the Ship of Theseus, where the object is replaced a small amount at a time, the puzzle seems to gets harder. Now imagine going even further and asking about the replacement of a thing one atom at a time or one subatomic particle at a time (both of which processes are constantly occurring). What does identity then mean?

Maybe one of the more interesting answers comes from those who like to add the temporal dimension to the consideration, such as in the Worm Theory as presented in the video above. When we question the temporal aspect of an object along with it’s identity, we start hinting at a possible answer to the question (see the Temporal Parts entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

We can say that any one thing is only ever fully identical to itself at one point in time, but then at other points in time it can only be similar to itself.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ― Heraclitus

From this viewpoint, using a name to define something falls back to the “loose and popular” context that Butler suggested. The answer would suggest then that the Ship of Theseus was only the same ship in the sense that it bore similarity to itself over time and that people still called it the Ship of Theseus is the only thing that made it the Ship of Theseus.

In that case, the axe that hewed the head laden with a swastika-marked tongue and the axe that you now have to defend yourself against the zombie at the door are only similar, and maybe you would call it a different axe since you know you’ve replaced the parts but the zombie calls it the same axe since it looks similar to the original. Not a very rewarding answer, but an answer nonetheless (and now you can get on with hacking down the zombie as he is more than likely about to come at you).

There’s rich food for thought there. Maybe Wittgenstein is right and it’s nonsense to even worry about two things being identical. That seems to fit well with the answer that considers the temporal aspect to mean that an object has unique temporal parts during its existence (look up perdurantism).

Whatever anyone’s consideration of this little thought experiment may be, I think we can all agree that it’s a lucky thing we don’t truly live in a world where someone with a swastika-tattooed tongue can get shot 8 times and have his head chopped off with an axe but then still find a way to come back from death and then sew his head back on before coming to find us with the likely intent of exacting revenge.

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This is an older piece I wrote sometime back and then resurrected for my Medium channel. I’m still on high adventure in Iceland, but will be sharing a longer post about all of our crazy adventures here soon!