The following article is a barely-edited copy of a discussion prompt I posted on Reddit in 2020. I will pose deeply philosphical questions, which you are free to answer literally or stay up late at night pondering.

I tried to skim over the philosophy here, but it all just kind of started pouring out, so here we go. I'm going to go over three general ideas in philosophy before we try to put them into practice—language and communication as meaningless, absurd, and incoherent; the panopticon, the gaze, and the way the gaze affects our behavior; existentialist ethics as a continuous process of redefining what humanity is meant to be; and free will as a paradoxical, self-defeating concept. As I wrap this up, I will attempt, again, to tie these back to my superficial hobby to see if it's really as superficial as I thought it was.

Note that I'm trying to simplify all of this, and that, as you'll see in section one, there's no way for me to represent these ideas precisely anyway, so don't bite my head off if I get something wrong.

Language Problems

We're going to start off by talking about semiotics—the study of signs. A sign is essentially anything that is used to communicate some meaning. One of the most obvious applications of this is communication through language. Signs might be letters, or words, or phrases.

One of Ludwig Wittgenstein's most famous ideas is that there are no true philosophical problems—only language problems. Some philosopher somewhere confused some other philosopher by using the wrong word, and this puzzle of confusion can only be solved by recombining the correct words so that everybody, again, understands. To be clear, he thinks that everything philosophers talk about is such confusion—ethics, theology, political philosophy... It's all just trouble we have communicating.

Other philosophers run with this to other strange extremes. Some point out that each word only makes sense in context, and therefore has infinite meanings in an infinite spectrum of contexts. To the extent that make sense, it's no wonder that philosophers are so confused. Jacques Derrida, as one example, adds on another layer of absurdity: with every word spoken, the context of the entire language is changed. This ever-shifting infinite hellscape of contexts means that no meaning is fixed for long enough to be understood. All our attempts at communication are a little bit ridiculous.

Derrida famously argues that "il n'y a pas de hors-texte"—"there is no 'out-of-context.'" The word "table" doesn't have an out-of-context meaning. It has one meaning in the context of a spreadsheet, and another in the context of a dining room, and more nuanced meaning in more specific contexts, but there is no way to remove the spreadsheet, and the dining room, and the year 2020, and the history of the English language, and the speaker's tone, and every other bit of context from the word. There is no hermetically sealed laboratory where the word itself can be probed for inherent meaning.

If you are into science, you might think about this in terms of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: as you attempt to measure a thing, if you're changing the thing itself in the process, a precise and complete measurement of that thing is impossible. Remember this principle going forward, because it ties into the next two concepts too!

Now, remember—we're not just talking about words, but signs. Clothing is very often used to convey some kind of meaning. Even if you're not trying to communicate anything, you'll signify something—at least that you're lazy, or that you don't put much stock in the way you dress. So this isn't just relevant to the way we talk about clothes, but the way we wear them.

Now, of course, people do still manage to communicate. Sometimes philosophers can be a little bit dramatic. The takeaway from these ideas should be that:

• Communication is very important
• Communication is inevitably imprecise
• Context is very important

Personally, I think of art as any attempt at being understood; if, when you dress, you are trying to be understood, you have a problem. You can't be understood with any precision in a world where context changes. But we have more issues here.

The Panopticon and Gaze

So let's say that you don't want to be understood, you just want to dress like you want to dress and post sick fits. Well... Here's the problem. You're in prison.

Jeremy Bentham designed a prison known as the Panopticon. The idea is, when you're in the Panopticon, there might be somebody watching you. There might be one guard who spends some of his time watching hundreds of prisoners, and at any given time, you might or might not be that prisoner. Since there might be somebody watching you, you're going to behave accordingly. He thought of this as essentially being the ideal prison.

French philosopher Michel Foucault took this idea as a metaphor for society. He said we are all in the panopticon—we are always being watched by somebody. The panopticon doesn't need to be a building to be a prison. It is any power structure that involves watching. From your webcam to your social media profile, the fact that you're being watched by some other power is in and of itself the prison.

Foucault also discussed the concept of the "Gaze" ("le regard")—as did Derrida and Sartre. You might be familiar with this in the context of Feminism—Laura Mulvey promoted the idea of the "Male Gaze." This concept further explores how we behave when we are aware that we are being watched, and even that others might be watching us. One might say such a gaze is oppressive, but the important takeaway here is that being watched does, inevitably, affect our behavior. Whether you are trying to please the observer, or lashing out against the observer, you are reacting—to totally forget that you can be seen is not within human nature. This places a strange, limiting effect on our freedom.

Of the people here who say they dress for themselves... An awful lot of you guys post fit pics. You have instagram accounts. You go out in public. You don't have hardware switches on your webcams, so the government might be watching you. You know people will react to the way you dress. How could you possibly not dress accordingly?

Sartre's Existentialist Ethics

I imagine some of you thought the above was strange. Well, I've got bad news for you guys, because Sartre takes things to a new level.

Existentialism is a funny movement. Founded by staunch theist Søren Kierkegaard, Existentialism actually relates strongly to the ways theologians discuss the meaning of life. Many argue that we were given a meaningless world so that we may build a meaning for it. But John Paul Sartre, likely the world's best-known existentialist, started from the opposite position. He considers his existentialism the necessary result of consistent atheism. (Yes, the French are really good at taking weird ideas and making them weirder).

Sartre begins his search to understand what man is meant to do by asking the same question for simple objects. What is a good hammer? Does it drive nails well? Does it remove them well? Is it best used to flatten hot metals? Or to flatten meats? Ultimately, Sartre decides that a good object is one that accomplishes the task for which it was made. If a hammer was made to tenderize meat, that's what it should do.

So when an atheist asks what man is meant to do... Man has no creator. Since man was not created to do anything in particular, our lives have no inherent meaning, only the meaning we ascribe to them.

It's worth taking a moment to point out Sartre's opinion on Free Will. It is absolute. Sartre believes that we not only have the choice of what to eat for breakfast in the morning, but what that breakfast will do with our bodies, and whether or not we should sprout wings and fly. These are all simple matters of choice.

And to Sartre, since our lives have no inherent meaning, our meaning and purpose are defined by our actions as humanity. Every time a person wakes up, that becomes a part of our meaning—a good human wakes up. The same is true for charity, but also, interestingly, for murder. All of these are merely actions taken towards defining our nature as human beings.

So every time you or somebody else wears a camp collar, we get a new answer to the question, "are printed camp collar shirts for white supremacists?" And while you can affect the answer to that question by participating in it, the fact that the answer constantly changes creates a danger. Coupled with the semiotics issue, your very reasonable wearing of a camp collar shirt today, or any garment for that matter, could be looked back on historians as aligning yourself with any particular movement (if, in fact, historians care about you for some reason). Even if you don't care what historians think, what anybody thinks... Under Sartre, you're not only changing the way you're being perceived, but the underlying prescriptive truth of how humans dress what humans are and what humans do. It's not a matter of perception—even if your fit is never seen, it is a choice that has been indelibly inked in the book that describes humanity.

Paradoxes of Free Will

So, let's say you've gotten past all that. You don't have social media, you don't post to reddit, you don't own any camera that isn't permanently obscured by an opaque barrier, your windows are all blacked out, and you do not leave your home, so absolutely nobody anywhere will ever know how you dress. And on top of that, let's say you don't give a crap about the existentialist perspective on the definition of mankind.

Well, why did you go through all that? Because of those same outside influences, right? And you're going to end up deciding what you like based on what you see others wear, or based on what's comfortable for the lifestyle you're in now—living at home. Every decision you make is going to be sourced by some preexisting, usually external factor, right?

This is the problem of determinism in free will—if all of our decisions are a necessary result of a series of causes—from the Drake's summer lookbook to the algorithm that showed it to you to the cloud that moved out of the way so that the sun woke you up at 6:56 this morning and left you in the mood to spend money today to the electron that changed the way that the sperm sell that became you mutated so that you were slightly smarter and earned a job that earned you enough money to pay for the blazer in the first place -- what part of that could you say was your decision? You're a slave to your conditions, are you not?

So... Say you believe in free will anyway. You must believe in a world that is at least somewhat non-deterministic. There has to be some element of that world that is not a necessary causal link. So far, our best guess about what that might be is that there is some factor of randomness. If some subatomic particle's behavior is not deterministic, but in fact random, then we've escaped the first problem! ... and stumbled upon another: if you're making your choices at complete random, or as a result of some combination of random dispositions and necessary causal results, then what part of that is free will?

Unfortunately, talking about the "soul" doesn't really get us around this. You ultimately still have to believe that the soul follows causal chains, or that there's something else about it that isn't causally correlated to anything before or after it, which is still essentially random, right? You want something else—something where you have power over yourself—but... what does that mean?

Can you describe any coherent system that satisfies our ideal of free will? Can you even think of a hypothetical state of the world that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside the way you did before you started reading this crap?

The best argument I've found is that free will is an emergent characteristic of an extremely complex system... but that system is still deterministic, or that unsatisfying mix of random and causal elements. It's still pretty illusory, it's just a believable illusion.

If you're dressing as a result of outside influences—are you really dressing in a vacuum the way you want to? Can you say you're dressing for yourself if you aren't really even making your own choices?

So... How can I dress the way I want to dress?

Man, I should have studied aesthetic philosophy at some point, that might have been easier to tie in.

Is any of this going to change the way you behave? Probably not. You're probably going to continue sharing fit pics—I hope you do, because I want to see them!—and you're probably still going to "make" "choices" even though those choices don't satisfy our philosophical desire to believe our choices are "ours."

But maybe you'll be more careful about the way you communicate—with your words, or your clothes.

Or maybe you'll be more mindful of your motivations. Maybe you'll recognize that, while you don't care about one audience, and dress for "yourself," you have actually found a community whose opinions you do care about, and recognize the effect their opinions have on you.

Or maybe, if you've been unsure about the way you dress, you'll see the absurdity in caring how people will react, and feel more free.

Or maybe this has gotten you to be mindful of the way people react, and, in making you aware of the panopticon or of man's constant quest to define himself, I've made you a neurotic mess like me.

Or maybe you guys have some other takeaways relevant to fashion. I'd be happy to hear them! Comments are open, have fun.