Are We Still In Kirkland?

It’s not always clear when I’m in Kirkland and when I’m not.  On my way home from work, or out and about with my wife and daughter, I find myself skirting the city limits and I often wonder, “am I still in Kirkland?”

This question makes me think about an engaging problem in modern philosophy known as The Problem of the Many.  The problem poses the following question: how do you define an object that does not have clearly distinguished borders?  How do you define fuzzy things? 

In his 1993 essay “Many, but Almost One,” the philosopher David Lewis uses a cloud as an illustrative means of presenting the puzzle.  Think of a cloud, Lewis instructs.  From the ground, the cloud appears to be one object with a clear, outlined boundary.  On closer inspection, however, the cloud is a mere collection of many individual water droplets; its edges are vague, indistinguishable and not as apparent (if at all obvious) as you at first concluded.  

Now, imagine – hovering there in midair – that you flick one water droplet from the cloud’s edge down to earth.  Without that single drop of water, are you left with the same cloud?  Flick away another droplet.  Still the same cloud?  Do this again and again (and again…) until eventually you are left with a single water droplet: is that single droplet the same cloud?  If it is, were you in fact gazing up from the ground at many small clouds and not just the one you thought?  And if not, at which point did the one cloud cease being what you thought was a single object drifting through the sky? 

Western Washington University’s philosophy professor Hud Hudson surveys many attempts to answer The Problem of the Many with wonderful clarity in his book A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person.  Hudson, however, applies the problem to human persons. How do we identify the “person,” Hudson inquires, among the world’s fuzzy material pieces?  Greater than the solutions to the puzzle Hudson presents is his ability to persuade us that The Problem of the Many is a problem that needs an answer.  We need to know who we are.   

The Problem of the Many aptly applies to the way we understand our community.  How do we define Kirkland?  An easy answer lies on a city map.  That answer, however, is not very meaningful (or interesting for that matter).  Rather, the bigger question that is filled with meaning is how do we define the rich sense of community that we think of as Kirkland? 

What are the edges of our community?  Where does it begin and where does it end?  Would our community be entirely different without the Kirkland Performance Center or Parkplace Books?  And if we rearranged, or removed, our neighborhoods – put the Highlands south of Central Houghton and drag North Rose Hill to Moss Bay – would that fundamentally change our community? What about non-geographical boundaries?  If we took away the youth baseball teams or the city’s lakefront activities, or if we discontinued the library’s free tutor service, are we still Kirkland? 

These questions are not entirely hypothetical.  June 1 marked the completion of Kirkland’s annexation.  The achievement added 31,000 new residents and 200 businesses from the Finn Hill, North Juanita and Kingsgate neighborhoods to Kirkland.  In what ways, if any, has this addition altered our community?  Perhaps the annexation areas have always constituted Kirkland’s fuzzy boundaries; the areas have possibly always been water droplets on the edge of Kirkland’s cloud.

In Hudson’s words, there are “Many Problematic Solutions to the Problem of the Many.”  But simply thinking about the issues it poses – regardless of the ultimate answers reached – reveals deeper truths about how we define our community and how we live in it.  Understanding the characteristics of our community enables us to salvage essential aspects of the community that might otherwise fade without our noticing. Likewise, we can nourish those fledgling features of our growing community that promise to define, for the better, the Kirkland of tomorrow. Either way, just asking the question, “what are our borders?,” keeps us from falling off its edge.