Gillette, Aristotle, and the Best a Man Can Get

Teleology is a fairly difficult word to pronounce, but an easy one to understand, if you’ll indulge me for five minutes.

It comes from the Greek word telos, meaning ‘end, goal, or purpose.’

For the sorts of Greeks who spent their lives discussing this sort of thing, presumably near some columns, it was an important word.

For Aristotle, in fact—up there with Socrates and Plato as one of the most important thinking Greeks—it was central to the nature of the universe.

Aristotle believed that everything in existence had been endowed by its creator with a telos—a purpose.

And this telos was reflected in the nature of the object itself.

Take an acorn, for example. Its telos is to become an oak tree.

As such, it is packed full of nutrients, has a tough outer shell to protect them, and is shaped like a little soil bullet for easy burial by helpful squirrels.

We humans, nature’s greatest toolmakers, are obsessed with teleology.

We see the world teleologically.

Show me a chair, and I don’t see several pieces of wood, some metal screws, and some felt.

I see a chair. And a chair has a telos—you sit on it.

I could take the chair apart and reassemble it—I could stack each leg on top of the other, connect them with the screws into a long pole, and glue the felt seat to one end.

Even though the materials would be identical, it would no longer be a chair.

If you asked me to tell you what it was, I might reasonably tell you that it was now a shovel, a snowplow, or even a weapon of some sort.

That’s because our language, and the way we view the world, is teleological.

We aren’t interested in what the thing is. We’re interested in what the thing does.

What’s the difference between a window and a patio door? In my house, they’re both pieces of glass within a frame with a handle.

The difference is that one allows me to walk through it into the garden.

The other only allows me to stare out of it for hours, wondering what the point of anything is.

It’s kind of exhausting being a human being when you stop and think about it.

We move through the world, subconsciously assigning purpose to everything we see.

It’s encoded, not just in our language, but also in the neural networks of our brain.

I think that’s probably why we enjoy walking in nature so much—we’re able to give our teleological brains a rest for five minutes.

Rivers, mountains, flowers—these things don’t really serve any immediate purpose for us.

We don’t see them teleologically (at least, until we’re very thirsty, or we realise we’ve forgotten our wedding anniversary).

And so, nature allows us simply to be for a while.

I have a pet theory that some people only enjoy music on a teleological level.

Let me explain—I definitely know people who just don’t care about music.

If it didn’t exist, I don’t think they’d miss it.

I used to go out with a girl who would tell her Amazon speaker to pump out what she called an ‘upbeat dance playlist’ as she was getting ready for work in the morning.

The music was purely functional—it made her feel energised (whilst making me want to disconnect the Amazon speaker and smash it to pieces).

She probably couldn’t have told you much about what she was actually listening to.

I could, and often did, as you can probably imagine.

(She didn’t put up with me for long.)

The gym/running/workout playlist is another example of teleological music.

People who otherwise don’t care at all about music will often deem it necessary for running, lifting weights, or doing those strange culty Hyrox classes, where they jump over random objects for an hour and then, presumably, convene in the changing rooms and cheat on their partners.

I’ve floated this theory with other people who confirm that, like me, the tempo or style of the music they’re listening to doesn't need to have anything to do with where they are or what they're doing.

It has an intrinsic, artistic value, independent of context.

By which I mean that I could happily run (if there could be such a thing as ‘happily running’) to Leonard Cohen or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

My brain would be engaged with the music, and my legs would be doing something else.

Music is used teleologically all the time, of course.

This is obviously something that I, as an insufferably judgmental sort of person, notice disparagingly.

I think this is because when music is too obviously functional, I feel it becomes a sort of insult to the entire medium.

Think about how much you come to hate the song that plays when a customer helpline puts you on hold.

Or one of my other pet hates—meditation or yoga music.

Floaty chords that mean nothing and have been cynically assembled in five minutes on a laptop somewhere in Bali in order to make you feel ‘chilled’ (whilst, obviously, collecting mechanical royalties).

People in advertising obviously understand the teleology of music.

In today’s world, where all the songwriting greats of the 20th century are selling their publishing for hundreds of millions of dollars to investment funds, this can verge on the traumatising.

Dylan’s transcendental classic Shelter from the Storm briefly became the soundtrack to an Airbnb commercial, for example.

Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life was used to sell Royal Caribbean cruises to wealthy pensioners.

Janis Joplin’s iconic anti-consumerist satire Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz? was famously used to sell, you guessed it, Mercedes-Benzes.

I suppose this speaks to the primordial power of music.

Its effects on human psychology are so irresistible that they’re bound to be taken advantage of.

And don’t worry—the war is occasionally waged both ways.

It’s not completely uncommon for a piece of functional music to break its own teleological chains and bust forth into the wider cultural conversation.

Think about some of your favourite film scores—the majesty of Howard Shore’s music from The Lord of the Rings, for example, or almost anything by John Williams.

Even more comically, as far as I’m concerned, is the current Gillette razor advert.

If you haven’t seen it, it features a jingle written by the legendary John Parr in the 1980s, resurrected and sung by a fashionable growly singer (Tom Sheeran or Jake Capaldi or Gerry Grennan—one of them).

The hilarious thing is that it’s also being sung by drunken English teenagers at bars and music festivals all over the country, despite the lyrics being:

You’re looking good, you’re looking sharp
You’ve come so far
And you know how to make
The most of who you are
Father to son
Doing what you’ve always done
Gillette
The best a man can get

Because John Parr is a legend (see criminally underappreciated classics like St. Elmo’s Fire or Restless Heart for ample proof), the tune is just too catchy to live and die with its accompanying advert.

You might be forgiven at this point for starting to question what the teleology of this newsletter is, given that it rarely contains any news (but does often contain a load of tenuous philosophy that you didn’t ask for).

My defence can be heard in the ancient echoes of the mountain, the gentle murmuring of the riverbed, and the hilarious sight of a crowd of 18-year-olds, arm in arm, screaming ‘Gillette, the best a man can get.’

Often, we find the most profound meaning in the places with the least practical purpose.

Keep dreaming,

Rob