Philosophy in The Simpsons

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By Gus Van Horn, cross-posted from the Gus Van Horn blog

Via Arts and Letters Daily, I have encountered an interesting analysis of the popular cartoon series, The Simpsons called, "The Simpsons as Philosophy". Julian Baggini, its author, makes several very good points in his essay, but his overall picture is fundamentally flawed.


I have always been ambivalent about The Simpsons. On the one hand, the cartoon is often brilliant satire. On the other, I have always found its portrayal of the Simpsons insulting because the family is clearly meant to portray the fundamental nature of its audience. The general feel I get from this is not even the occasionally appropriate message, "Don't take yourself too seriously." Instead, it's "Never take yourself seriously at all." Why? Because we're all a bunch of incompetent boobs, and our ideals are nothing better than rationalizations for our true, and very banal, motives. Sorry, but I refuse to think of myself as Homer Simpson.


On the points that the Simpsons is sometimes brilliant philosophical satire, and that its message is that we are an absurd species living in an absurd world, Baggini fully agrees with me. He states these points in reverse order early in his essay, because he is hoping to make the latter point himself.

We now know we're just a bunch of naked apes trying to get on as best we can

, usually messing things up, but somehow finding life can be sweet all the same. All delusions of a significance that we do not really have need to be stripped away, and nothing can do this better that the great deflater: comedy.

The Simpsons does this brilliantly, especially when it comes to religion. It's not that the Simpsons is atheist propaganda;

its main target

is

not belief in God or the supernatural, but

the arrogance of particular organised religions that they, amazingly, know the will of the creator

.

For example, in the episode Homer the Heretic, Homer gives up church and decides to follow God in his own way: by watching the TV, slobbing about and dancing in his underpants. [bold added]

Where Baggini and I differ is on this point: He agrees that life and humanity are absurd to the point of reveling in the absurdity, whereas I disagree.


The origin of this difference of opinion lies in the fundamentally different philosophical outlooks Baggini and I hold. And while I have never heard of Baggini before, and would not have been able to say anything at all about his philosophical views off the top of my head, his essay is unusually frank for something from the popular press. Baggini very conveniently spells out his epistemological beliefs for us!


Baggini's views on epistemology become apparent when he attempts to explain what he calls a "rich philosophical worldview":

Revealing simple truths about simplistic falsehoods is not just a minor philosophical task, like doing the washing up at Descartes' Diner while the real geniuses cook up the main courses.

For when it comes to the relevance of philosophy to real life, all the commitments we make on the big issues are determined by considerations which are ultimately quite straightforward.




Pointillist paintings, such as this by Seurat, use thousands of tiny dots
. A rich philosophical worldview is in this sense like a pointillist picture

- one of those pieces of art in which a big image is made up of thousands of tiny dots (see Seurat image, right). Its building blocks are no more than simple dots, but the overall picture which builds up from this is much more complicated.

Yet we need reminding that the dots are just dots, and that errors are made more often not by those who fail to examine the dots carefully enough, but those who become fixated by the brilliance or defects of one or two and who fail to see how they fit into the big picture. [bold added]

This will sound very reasonable to most readers because it assumes and alludes to the inductive nature of human knowledge, that we can neither just make baseless, arbitrary statements to the effect that we know the will of God (or that there is one), nor deduce the whole of an objective worldview from first principles. (These are the two most common fundamental philosophical errors out there, and many, including perhaps Baggini, seem convinced that we are forced to choose between these two false alternatives.)


However, "commitments" on "big issues" are not insignificant parts of a greater whole, like the dots on a Seurat painting. A consistent thinker will see that the implications of any such "commitment" will affect his notions on other things. An inconsistent thinker will not -- but he has already decided a fundamental issue for himself: that he does not have to think in order to live. The rest of his life will be lived on the whim of the moment or based on premises absorbed passively from those around him (really the same thing, in effect). The pieties he mouths, consistent or not, will not really count as parts of a "worldview" since he will not really understand what they mean.


The butchers of September 11, 2001 made a "commitment" on the "big issue" of whether there is a God, and on what he thought they should do. They were consistent and they acted on it because the answers they reached on fundamental issues affected the whole picture for them. On the other hand, slothful bumblers like Homer Simpson appear to be inconsistent. They muddle through on whim and on premises absorbed passively from others. Fundamentally, the murder-bombers and Homer Simpson represent two fundamental types: someone who seeks knowledge through faith, and someone who views knowledge as unattainable at all. Both fail to ground their worldviews on objective reality. And both see the entire course of their lives affected by their "commitment" on the "big issue" of epistemology! Some dot.


The notion that the various and mutually contradictory views the Homers spout represent a rich -- much less coherent -- picture is wishful thinking at best. As Ayn Rand pointed out in
Philosophy: Who Needs It
, whether one chooses to be consistent or not, he will live in accordance with a philosophy -- and whether he can explicitly name his fundamental premises or not.


And so, in stating the point that answers to major philosophical issues are irrelevant, Baggini has stated his allegiance to a subjectivist viewpoint, and to the notion that systematically considering ideas is irrelevant. Unsurprisingly, this leads him to the following nihilistic conclusion.

Another reason why cartoons are the best form in which to do philosophy is that they are non-realistic in the same way that philosophy is.




Philosophy needs to be real in the sense that it has to make sense of the world as it is, not as we imagine or want it to be

. But philosophy deals with issues on a general level. It is concerned with a whole series of grand abstract nouns: truth, justice, the good, identity, consciousness, mind, meaning and so on.

Cartoons abstract from real life in much the same way philosophers do

. Homer is not realistic in the way a film or novel character is, but he is recognisable as a kind of American Everyman. His reality is the reality of an abstraction from real life that captures its essence, not as a real particular human who we see ourselves reflected in. [bold added]

Note that Baggini "richly" contradicts himself in the first two sentences of this quote. According to him, this should not make us doubt that his philosophical conclusions about reality, even though he himself regards philosophy as "non-realistic". And what does he regard as "non-realistic"? Abstraction, which is what man's conceptual faculty does. If you wanted a more explicit rejection of man's ability to reach the truth through reason, you just about couldn't ask for one.


But Baggini is on to something when he says the following.

The satirical cartoon world is essentially a philosophical one because to work it needs to reflect reality accurately by abstracting it, distilling it and then presenting it back to us, illuminating it more brightly than realist fiction can.

This is, in fact why Ayn Rand presented much of her philosophy in the form of novels. Man's mind does not exist in a vacuum, nor does he live in one. To reach objective truth, even -- the adverb is for Bagginis's benefit -- in philosophy, requires a process of abstraction, integration, and the formation and testing of further conclusions against reality -- of induction. And so, as a presenter of a philosophy, Rand did not merely present arguments. She provided examples in support of these arguments.


So Baggini is correct that this cartoon is good at presenting philosophical ideas to an audience by concretizing them. But then, it is a cartoon, where each episode is independent of the others, and the long-range and real-world consequences of much of what goes on do not obtain. Instead, we "reset" with each new episode, just as Wile E. Coyote would get up every time he fell off a cliff or blew himself up chasing the Roadrunner every Saturday morning when I grew up.


In other words, if you want to convince someone that they can't think, make fun of brazen mistakes day in and day out -- to generalize the notion that all "commitments" on "big issues" are absurd -- but magically bring the Simpsons back as they were before on the next week to keep your viewer from wondering how these boobs manage to remain alive at all -- to see why they must think. Compare this to the time scale of years in another work of art, Atlas Shrugged.


And so art can be used to make a philosophy easier or harder to understand (to the extent that it does or does not name principles honestly and explicitly), and easier or harder to absorb (via induction) for its audience. Ayn Rand's novels explain and make it easier for their readers to understand and absorb Objectivism, a philosophy that champions reason as a means of truly understanding the world and of leading one's life. Matt Groening's The Simpsons foists nihilism on its audience by explicitly lampooning specific beliefs, but implicitly lampooning man's rational faculty.


I found Baggini's essay both thought-provoking for its insight into the ability of art to communicate abstract principles and fundamentally flawed for its own support of the incorrect ideas implicitly advanced by The Simpsons. Baggini seems to argue that philosophical ideas should not be evaluated like points ripped out of context, but yet this is precisely what he argues we should do, as evidenced by his anaology of Pointilism.


A more accurate analogy would be that certain "big issues" are not single points, but the materials -- like canvas, paint, and the artist's own effort -- that make the art possible at all, and that a bad decision about any of these can ruin the whole picture. Indeed, Baggini's own decision to use this analogy, far from being a little dot in an otherwise good essay, trandforms his essay into a monstrous attack on reason disguised as a puff piece on a popular show. In the process, he has inadvertently demonstrated that his overall point is completely wrong.


The bigger lesson is that in the marketplace of ideas, as in any other, Caveat emptor.


-- CAV

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/blog/archives/000863.html