Ego as Thermometer

Matt Schneeweiss

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"It is sooooo hot in here!" "It is freezing in here!"

Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I want to ask them: What do you mean by "it"?

When a person says, "It's hot" or "It's cold," what the person really means is "I am hot" or "I am cold." Such a person is really making a statement about the temperature relative to himself or herself, but couching that statement in objective terms. What is really a subjective feeling is being treated as an objective quality of the room, in the same way one might say, "This room is off-white" or "This room is empty." In truth, it is more precise to say, "I feel hot" or "I feel cold."

"So what?" you might ask, "People speak imprecisely all of the time. Everyone knows what they really mean."

Believe it or not, I have seen many people get into arguments over the temperature in a room. One guy will complain, "It's freezing in here, let's turn on the heat!" and the other guy will respond, "What do you mean? It's stuffy in here! You're crazy!" Each one of these individuals is making the same error: treating a personal feeling as an objective reality.

As long as each disputant treats his position as an objective statement, there is no room for resolution. If I say, "The earth is flat" and you say "The earth is not flat," only one of us can be correct. We can examine the properties of the common object of discussion and come to an agreement. But when one person say, "It's cold" and the other person says, "It's warm," they won't get anywhere because they are talking about different "it"s. If both of them would recognize that they are really just making statements about themselves, they would go about settling their quarrel differently.

In a nutshell, the mistake being made is confusing matters of taste with matters of truth. Even in seemingly innocuous matters, the division between these two realms should be kept in mind.