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Black cats, knocking on wood, and broken mirrors. Bad luck.
Superstitions, like the wishes we explored in Issue X, occupy a space of epistemic and metaphysical uncertainty. They linger ominously in the back of our minds in conflict with reason when we reach for wood to knock on, reason that whispers to us that it doesn’t matter, it can’t matter.
Well, maybe they are nothing more than manifestations of our philosophically vicious beliefs, rooted purely in fear and irrationality. Or maybe they function as means to cope with the imposition of the unexplainable on reality as we conceive it through what is in our control—our (il)logical schemas of causation and our role in them. Superstitions provide an answer to the question: How can we guarantee our futures will be good to us?
If we remove ourselves from rationalism, practicing superstitions transforms into a kind of moral accounting in the universal balance of fate, luck, karma: we somehow believe that throwing the spilled salt over our left shoulder with our left hand puts us in a better standing with the unknown forces that manipulate our existence. Because it’s somehow easier to explain away just doing the act—regardless its triviality or apparent silliness—to guarantee our future luck and/or dispel the universe’s ceaseless motion moving us towards those fearful unknowns. Superstitions are comforting. And we feel a magnetic pull towards them, because, well, “why not?” we ask, sidestepping the ladder.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus can intriguingly, if not counterintuitively, provide us some guidance towards understanding superstitions. His penultimate proposition is an admission to language’s conspiratorial tautology, its self-referentially closed system: “he who understands me finally recognizes my propositions as senseless.” If the content of his propositions define everything in our world, then it follows that everything is senseless. Or, perhaps, it is all senseless when we use cold and calculated logic, because reality does not comply with logic’s rules. Logic defies reality in trying to define it. Superstitions arise from it.
Wittgenstein proceeds to instruct that “when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them … He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it ... he must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly” (6.54). We put parameters on reality and irreality through our superstitious ladder-avoidance, but maybe we should just take his advice and climb up on it; embrace the senselessness of it all.
Just as beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, so is luck. Or so we can let it be when we pick up that one lucky penny as we continue down our paths towards the uncertain future.
Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy
