The Greatest Tiger

Let us suppose that tigers exist. That is, of course, a fairly unprovable assertion, at least without running the risk of getting mauled, but let us grant that tigers are tigers. Thus there must be something with defines the state of being a tiger: teeth, claws, carnivorous appetites, stipes, a cat-like appearance and so on.

Now, let us suppose that there are two types of tiger, characterized by orange and black stripes (the ‘orange tiger’) and by black and white stripes (the ‘white tiger’). We are now left with the question as to which type (species) of tiger is most ‘tigerish’, that is, most like the ideal type of tiger that we have in our minds.

Both species of tiger show, of course, most of the characteristics of ‘being a tiger’ – the teeth, claws, appetite, and stripes. So only the colour of the tiger is at issue. Is orange or white more distinctive of a tiger?

Most people would probably opt for an orange tiger as being the typical sort of tiger, the sort that most humans when thinking of the word tiger would conjure up. Thus, we can say that the orange tiger is the most tigerish or tigers, while the white is not quite as tigerish, due to its colour.

Suppose there was a supporter of the primacy of the white tiger, or even a white tiger of philosophical bent. They could argue that, in fact, as white contains all other colours, the tigerishness of the white tiger includes the tigerishness of all other tigers, including orange tigers and every other hue of potential tiger – red, green and blue and all points in between. We can, for the moment at least, discard the possibility of ultra-violet and infra-red tigers.

We have now generalized one of our assumptions, that there are only two sorts of tiger. The white tiger, it is now claimed, displays the tigerishness of all possible tigers, as the white tiger contains all possible colours of tiger, as well as the other characteristics of the animal.

The orange tiger can reply to this arguing that the white tiger is a white tiger, and not all tiger colours. White is a distinctive colour, a pigmentation, not a conglomeration of all possible colours. That might work with white light, the argument could go, but does not work with fur. White light when beamed through a prism may refract into all the possible colours, but white tigers do not.

A response to this might be that while white tigers do not, admittedly, refract, observing a white tiger through an orange filter would make the white tiger’s fur orange, while observing an orange tiger through a white filer would leave the perception of the orange tiger as being orange. Thus, in some sense, the perception at least of a white tiger contains all possible tigers.

The argument might develop along a number of lines at this point. For example, the orange tiger could suggest that the perception of a tiger and its reality are not the same thing. While someone could perceive a white tiger as being orange, and hence deduce that they were perceiving an orange tiger, this does not mean that the tiger is orange. In fact, the perceiver could well identify the white tiger seen through and orange filter as a tiger because they then perceive the tiger as being of a normal colour (orange) for a tiger. This, therefore, is further evidence for orange tigers being the most tiger-like tigers, not the contrary.

Another development could be along idealist lines. We believe that there is a form of tiger, call it Tiger, in some higher dimension. All tigers participate in this form, through some unknown mechanism. The Tiger gives tigers of all hues their tigerishness. This works (except for the mystical ‘participation’ bit) but does not solve our problem. Is the Tiger orange or white? We have only moved the problem into a higher dimension, not solved it.

We can argue, perhaps, that the problem here is one of definition. Are we defining ‘tiger’ as being white or orange? If we decide to call one a ‘tiger’ and the other a ‘snow tiger’ then we can resolve the problem. Tigers are tigers and snow tigers are snow tigers. That partially defines away our dilemma, but only partially. A snow tiger is still a recognizable tiger; we have just defined away its potential equivalence to an orange tiger. We could equally define a white tiger as a tiger and an orange tiger as an orange tiger, and we would still have to same problem.

The question then arises as to whether we can think of a ‘tiger more tigerish than can be thought’, the ultimate tiger, or, perhaps, the Tiger of the ideal form. Perhaps we can, although we still run into the problem of the colour of the specific tigers in front of us. We could have the form of a white tiger, and the form of an orange tiger, but that, again, merely seems to move the problem to a different dimension, that of the relationship between the forms of the tigers – are they both derived from a higher form of ‘tiger’, or are they independent?

I am really not sure there is an answer to this problem, and many people would probably argue that it is a pseudo-problem anyway. Tigers come in both white and orange forms. One is not more of a tiger than another, they are both tigers, just different tigers. Do we really need to relate one tiger to another and find out which epitomizes the tiger? After all, if we meet a tiger in the jungle, we are unlikely to question whether it is a proper tiger or not – running away or climbing a tree would seem to be a sensible option rather than quizzing it as to its tigerishness.

And yet it does not seem that the problem is quite so simple to dismiss. There are tigers both orange and white. But how do we know they are both tigers without having some higher conceptual Tiger’ to compare them with?