Morals in South Park?

Pop-Culture conceptions of philosophy and Philosophy.

Most people feel that, for a field of academic research to be worthwhile (and a fortiori for it to deserve government funding) it must offer some benefit – direct or indirect, actual or potential – to society at large, beyond that tiny group of people who make it their career. Such benefit is trivial to show for research fields like medicine or computer science, and nearly so for pure biology or pure math; for philosophy it is slightly trickier.

When I was considering a career as an academic philosopher, my answer to these challenges rested on the way in which philosophical ideas diffuse out from the ivory towers into every facet of culture, making valuable insights available to people who would never and perhaps could never approach these ideas in abstract. Philosophers don’t just think things through for their own edification; they do so on behalf of everyone else who can’t be bothered. Explicit liaison with the non-academic mainstream, however distasteful it might be to purists, is one of the ways in which the profession of philosophy earns its keep – not just by giving third-rate philosophers something to do, but by making philosophy itself relevant and valuable to more people.

I’ve found the results rather dissapointing, especially when the subject has been potentially quite fertile. The Buffy entry was dissapointing, at least given the skim I gave it at my local B & N. It was shallow where it should have been deep (see, especially, the rather obvious and unenlightening feminist theory essays), and in general the essays are a bit too breezy in tone for my taste. The series is a great idea, but the volumes I’ve seen don’t really seem to take themselves seriously enough, which is maddening.

Here in the United States one of the biggest publishing phenomena is the rise of Japanese comics (manga). This is accompanied by a rising interest in Japanese animation (anime), though anime is a smaller part of its market than manga is in publishing.

Since the audience in Japan is heterogenous (well, for Japan), some manga (e.g., animator Hayao Miyazaki’s graphic novel, “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds”) are written at least partially for adults and are reasonably seen as heavily-illustrated literature (most exported anime seems mired in the late-adolescent, early-twenties market). Many works take their audience seriously.

Also, since the primary audience is not a Western one, the works often have an interestingly different perspective on philosophical issues (again, look at Miyazaki’s work).

This suggests ” Philosophy, anime, and manga”, taking exemplary works of manga as illustrating philosophical viewpoints (from a practical perspective, it is easier to excerpt manga in a book than it is anime). Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa” could be used to examine ethics and issues of responsibility, it could be seen as a critique of humanism (in that Miyazaki sets humans in a natural order and can be viewed as undermining the primacy of the human-centric view of that order). A lot of Miyazaki’s films can be seen from the same perspective.

There are a lot of manga series that play delicious games with gender roles (the most well known is “Ranma 1/2”, in which the main character’s body changes from male to female at inopportune times through the workings of a curse).

There are even some things that look at epistemological questions or issues in the philosophy of mind. Here I think anime does a better job than manga.

You say that you _do_ think that generating wider interest in philosophy is a good thing, but then say that you’re “a little sceptical of the success of the Popular Culture and Philosophy series at helping here.” That’s plainly silly: The Simpsons and Philosophy has sold over 200,000 copies, the Matrix book was on the NYT bestseller list, the book on Lord of the Rings is selling very well also. They’ve been reprinted in many languages, they’ve attracted media attention from as far away as Australia and New Zealand, they’ve been discussed in this country in media as diverse as the NYT and People Magazine. Obviously, the books _are_ generating wider interest in philosophy. You also think that my view on this makes “an assumption that good philosophy needs to be given a marketing spin in order to reach the masses.” Actually, bad philosophy needs this too – what I mean is that, for the most part, people outside the academy view philosophy as abstact technical stuff that has no bearing on their lives (or they think it’s New-Age-y stuff about crystals and reincarnation). By using popular culture references, we can show people this isn’t so. If you would actually read some of this stuff, you’d see that it’s not an exercise in dumbing down, and neither is it a relativistic “Seinfeld is as good as Shakespeare” approach. It’s about getting people interested in philosophy. All the contributors to the series do “real” philosophy, by the way, and we have often found that people discovered our “real” work – or that of Aristotle or Nietzsche – after having seen us write something about Seinfeld or the Simpsons. “DJW” complains that the books “don’t really seem to take themselves seriously enough,” though he or she seems to have only “skimmed” the Buffy book. But look, if the books went too far in the other direction, we’d be rightly criticized for taking these things too seriously. In any case, I can assure you that the forthcoming volume on Woody Allen takes itself seriously to the appropriate degree.

Actually, philosophy is popularised daily by much bigger-selling books than any mentioned. Alice in Wonderland; George and Martha; Where the Wild Things Are; the Frog and Toad books (Lobel’s masterpiece, Grasshopper on the Road, is more sociological than philosophical), The Wizard of Oz (the bizarre book, not the film)… Its just that everyone forgets they did philosophy when they were young.

I strongly urge the editors of the Open Court series to embarrass Brian by inviting him to contribute to a volume. And I strongly urge Brian to accept.

I stopped feeling guilty about the use of popular culture as jumping-off points for more serious discussions quite some time ago. When I finally managed to explain the at-least-partial validity of using popular culture as a springboard to my mother, I wrote the explanation down as an essay.

http://www.bedford.net/teep/guilty.htm

If Nat Whilk, whoever that is, thinks we have nothing interesting to say, that makes me cry. The quarter-of-a-million people who think we do – much happier. But factually speaking, it’s false that these are exclusively the products of junior faculty. It’s also false that the essays in the series consist only of inserted catch-phrases.

“You seem to be assuming that people who buy your books think your books are interesting. Is that a good assumption?”

I don’t know – that’s why I and everyone I know buys books. In any case, are you not exaggerating? Not a single essay in any of the books in the series is interesting? On the other hand, at least you’ve read two, which is more than some of the would-be critics here have read.
As to your other points, yeah, you’re right, you didn’t say “exclusively,” but the real issue is: whether an essay was written by an assistant or associate or full professor has no bearing on whether it’s interesting or not. As to your suggestion that the only reason for writing this stuff is to make the CV look good (which, BTW, contradicts Brian’s sneering claim that it would be a career-killer to participate in this series), two responses: (a) that’s ad hominem and (b) all contributors to the series do plenty of “real” work as well.
Lastly, I really am sorry you didn’t find them interesting, but if they succeed in getting other people to consider further reading in or study of philosophy, they’ve been a success.

This is slightly off-topic, but since some people have commented on children’s books and philosophy, I wanted to bring attention to Gary Matthews wonderful books on philosophy and children. The three that I have read are:

Dialogues with Children
Philosophy and the Young Child
the Philosophy of Childhood

(All three are published by Harvard. I am pretty sure that all three are still in print.)

These books are great. They are philosophical interesting – I thought about using the first book in an intro. philosophy class, but reluctantly decided against this- and they are genuinely moving. [Disclaimer: I’m a UMass grad. who greatly admires both Gary’s philosophical abilities and personal qualities.]

Also, there’s this website, which Gary is involved in:

http://philosophyforkids.com/

I’d just like to point out that I never said participating in these series would be a career killer. That would be obviously false, since Jim Pryor (to pick just one example from the Matrix page I linked to above) seems to be doing pretty well post his involvement. I said writing the book I had in mind could be fairly bad for my career. And given the pre-existing views people have about me (doesn’t take things seriously enough, jumps between too many topics, etc), and the fact that for the forseeable future it would be the only book on my CV, I really don’t think it would help. Which isn’t to say I won’t do it if the 101 version would really make that much money :)

On Harry’s point about the invitation, I’d have to have a fairly specific reason for writing about that topic. I don’t think I’d get much out of writing a paper where I just molded my pre-existing views to a particular topic.

As in, I have a theory about the Sorites paradox, there’s a discussion of a Sorites paradox in X, so I can write up my theory as it applies to the paradox in X. The (career-derailing) book might have stuff like that, but I don’t really see the value in a contribution to X and philosophy that reads like that. If it was a particularly interesting version of the Sorites perhaps it would be good, but not if it’s just applying a familiar theory.

To take a more real-life case, I don’t think there’s much to be said for writing up a paper on the connection between causation and responsibility as it applies in _Who Killed Davey Moore?_ for the Dylan and Philosophy volume, unless the Davey Moore case actually reveals something interesting about the theory. And it might for all I know – I think looking for real-life examples like that is pretty valuable way of working out the bumps in a theory. That’s part of why Richard’s Star Trek book works I think – some of the cases genuinely are hard cases for familiar philosophical views. (I love the range of cases, often from relatively popular culture, that Ken Walton discusses in detail in his papers. Of course it’s easier to do this in aesthetics.) But a paper that says little more than “And here’s another case where my theory applies” I’m not sure of the value of.

Aeon Skoble wrote:

“As to “Nat Whilk“‘s continued ad hominems: since he insists on hiding behind a pseudonym, I’ll just assume he’s making ad hominems he wouldn’t want to be publicly committed to, and hence I need not bother replying.”

I thought an ad hominem was a claim that an argument is invalid because of who wrote it. (E.G., “This argument is invalid because it’s being produced by someone using a pseudonym.”) Once again, let me say that the reason I brought up the status of the authors of the Seinfeld and Simpsons books is that I thought it simply might provide an explanation for why they were so boring. Of course, it can’t explain everything. For example, it was an associate professor (presumably, already with tenure) who wrote the article revealing the shocking fact that the Simpsons writers apparently aren’t Marxists.

I think Harry has the right idea, but feel the need to add another consideration. If philosophers only write for other philosophers in a language so technical that it can only be understood by those with the right kind of degrees, then philosophy will hold on to its present marginal state. Admittedly, my love for philosophy does cause me to want to communicate with those outside the narrow confines of tenured philosophy professors. And, of course, not everyone outside that community brings the same depth of understanding to an issue, say, feminism. So, sure, someone who has never much thought about feminism is going to get more out of an essay on Buffy and feminism than someone who has spent years with it. I fail to see the problem with that simple fact–the essay wasn’t written for someone with a broad background in feminist ethics. That an essay isn’t addressed to every reader (or even the philosophical professional) does not render it philosophically or pedagogically worthless. But, goodness, what philosophy essay addresses every potential reader? I’m guessing not even papers in the Review of Metaphysics do that.

Full disclosure: I edited the above mentioned “dissapointing” Buffy volume.

For what it’s worth, Allen Wood was recently a guest on “Philosophy Talk”, hosted by Ken Taylor and John Perry. Here’s a link to the streaming audio of that program:

http://vodreal.stanford.edu/opa/philo/040427.ram

The program’s website is http://www.philosophytalk.org

Like some of the others in this thread, I have vested interest in this sort of thing.

First, the “career-killer” risk is real. Maybe it depends where you are, but my impression is that in academic philosophy (for career purposes, at least), “popular” writing either doesn’t count at all, or counts negatively, irrespective of quality. I’ve mostly had to live down my _Star Trek_ book.

Second, having recently come back from the dead, I’m (wisely or no) going into popularising mode again (I’m also on _The Matrix_ website philosophy section). Last year I even pitched to Open Court the idea of a _South Park and Philosophy_ volume. They said no, so I recently wrote to Trey Parker and Matt Stone to see if they’re interested in an “authorised” version.

I have two main thoughts about this. One: maybe I’m a snob, but I think philosophy can do a much better job of popularising than we have seen so far. I don’t think the problem is that the philosophers have been mainly assistant professors. (I’d expect a correlation between relative youth and interest in popular culture. And hey, sometimes it’s better to employ the young and hungry–in both senses.) It’s rather that rigour has taken a back seat, partly in an attempt to be too popular, and partly because of philosophical orientation.

Two: some of these popular shows, much as I love them, just _aren’t that deep_, philosophically, and authors really have to stretch to make meaningful connections. (Obviously, I think _South Park_ is an exception.)

What is to be done? We serious analytic types can remain on the sidelines and scoff (not an unpleasant pastime), or we can resign ourselves to the fact that these collections sell, and are selling an impression of philosophy as well. I choose to muck in and try to make that impression a bit better than it would otherwise be.

I’ll let you know how the _South Park_ thing turns out.