This essay was written by Porter Kindall, a BYU Humanities Center student fellow.
“I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real” – Ben Gibbard
In the landscape of indie rock, few albums have achieved the cult status of The Postal Service’s Give Up. Released in 2003, the album charts the course of a man navigating heartbreak, culminating in a particular brand of existential despair that has resonated with listeners for two decades. But beyond its synth-pop hooks and melancholic lyrics, one of the album’s songs, “Clark Gable,” presents a philosophical puzzle: what happens when our attempts to manufacture love fall perfectly into place, yet the feeling itself remains stubbornly absent? Surprisingly, the answer may lie in the structure of logical proof.
“Clark Gable” begins while the narrator is “waiting for a cross-town train in the London Underground.” Here, he has the best idea he’s had yet to salvage his deteriorating relationship: asking his lover to “pretend that [they] are in love again.” This idea is motivated by the fact that he’s “been waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound like a movie,” and so he schemes to make a short film where they fall in love again.
Equipped with a “camera and a van,” he prepares to make his little movie. Things seem like they might go awry at first, but he keeps things under control and is even able to fake the rain that the script had called for. Everything is perfect, down to the kiss “in a style Clark Gable would have admired,” but—even within that perfection—love fails to appear. The song ends by considering if “your perfect verse is just a lie you tell yourself to help you get by,” and the next song on the album is a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which “the air outside will make our cells divide at an alarming rate until our shells cannot hold all our insides in and that’s when we’ll explode.”
Safe to say, love remains outside the grasp of its recreation in film in “Clark Gable.” Even if we, with the narrator, “want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real,” it seems that it needs something more than construction. The way I see it, if we want to arrive at love directly and to create it from the ground up, we’re going to miss the very love we so badly wanted to have in the first place. So, the question arises, what does it mean to want to believe in love? How do we get to something like truth? Here, we turn to classical logic.
Classical logical reasoning can be broken down into two broad categories of proofs: direct and indirect. Direct proofs take the following general form:
1) If P then Q
2) P
3) Therefore, Q
For example:
- If it is raining, then the ground is wet.
- It is raining.
- Therefore, the ground is wet.
Indirect proof, at least when I first encountered it, bothered me a lot. It doesn’t follow the same idea as a direct proof; instead, it admits that one might have to go through a false idea to arrive at a true one. If it feels difficult to follow, that’s okay—it should push against your intuitions at least a little bit. The general form of an indirect proof is something like this:
1) We wish to prove that if P then Q (e.g., “if it rains, then the ground gets wet”)
2) Let us assume by way of contradiction, not if P then Q (e.g., “if it is not raining, then the ground is wet”)
3) etc.
Making this (somewhat) more concrete:
- We wish to prove that if it is raining, then the ground is wet.
- Assume that if it is not raining, then the ground is wet.
- However, the ground is dry and it is not raining.
- Therefore, it must be true that if it is raining, then the ground is wet.
This first step establishes what you want to show is true, what you wish to prove. The second step is to imagine what the world would be like if what you wanted to prove was, in fact, false rather than true. Step three through the end would attempt to find a contradiction—an instance where one and the same thing is found to be both true and false at the same time—to therefore prove that the false statement assumed cannot be the case.
Proof by contradiction, rather than proving that something is true, proves that something is not not true. Logically, this is completely coherent, given two commitments: (1) things are either true or false—this is called the law of the excluded middle—and (2) things cannot be both true and false at the same time‚ called the principle of non-contradiction. These commitments constitute what philosopher Alain Badiou calls ‘the strictest form of reasoning’—and if a French philosopher known for dense work endorses it, it must be worth considering. But there’s a potential problem for those who wish to engage in an indirect proof: how do I know that I will arrive at a contradiction? How do I know that I will show something is both true and false?
The potential issue with an indirect proof is that you don’t know for certain that a contradiction will arise. At times, you might assume the truth of something hoping to disprove it but never find something to be both true and false at the same time. There is no certainty that one will arrive at a contradiction. Instead, you might assume the truth of something and live your life based on that assumption, never finding a contradiction. You would, in that case, have simply chosen to follow what felt true. But when this is combined with logical rigor, you get something that looks quite a bit like certainty.
Consider what would happen if the narrator of “Clark Gable” subscribed to the form of an indirect proof. Before, the narrator went into the situation with the assumption that there was no truth and that love was not real, no matter how much he might want them to be. But let’s suppose he imagines that “there is truth, that love is real,” and lives his life according to that assumption. If he never runs into a contradiction, then love does arrive and truth is revealed. By approaching his philosophical puzzle indirectly rather than directly, he preserves the ideas of truth and love in his lived experience. This, at least to me, seems like the kind of life I would want to chase. A life where belief gets me pretty far on the way to the realization of what I long for. A life where truth, love, and hope are found.
