The Mindless Viewer and Philosophy

One thing that can tick me off is when someone mentions in passing that they killed an evening by watching or playing some mindless entertainment. ‘Entertainment,’ in fact, is usually perceived as the opposite of educational by many parents and educational experts when they decide what shows children should watch on TV (usually educational shows as opposed to the kinds that the parents themselves watched when they were growing up). What I would contend is that the only reason any entertainment can be mindless is when the person engaging in it has left their mind at the door.

One consolation for me these days is a series of books from Open Court dealing with pop culture and its philosophical roots. The series began in 1999 with Seinfeld and Philosophy and has gone on to deal with TV series such as The Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos, films such as The Matrix and Star Wars, the pastimes of baseball and Harleys, and influential figures such as Woody Allen, Monty Python and Bob Dylan. With twenty titles released and five more on the way (see complete list here), the series seems ready to tackle just about any aspect of popular culture.

From a personal perspective, I can tell you that when I picked up the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy book, Buffy was simply a show I kept meaning to look at but hadn’t gotten around to. A few essays into the book and I had to go out and rent a season of the series. Within a week I was a full-fledged convert to the Buffyverse. Who’d ‘a thunk a philosophy book could turn me on to a TV series?

The purpose of the …And Philosophy series is two-fold: to ground philosophy in imagery and stories that most people are familiar with, and to show that the everyday culture we take for granted can tell us some truly profound things. And while I’m sure there are many people out there who would see this enterprise as a waste of time (academics who think pop culture is a wasteland, and pop culture fans who are sick of people reading too much into things), I think the series is one of the best things going right now.

For one thing, philosophy has been on the ropes for a while. I can remember when I was an undergrad and the university I attended was small enough that they could have every department represented by a desk in the main gym. This was pre-computer registration (by a year or two – larger universities had already switched to the now standard method) and so each student had to sign up for courses by visiting each department desk they wanted courses from. It was a fairly intuitive and for the most part friendly process, giving students a chance to chat up a professor or two while signing up. The funny and sad bit was when I saw the two philosophy profs walking around the desk they manned, calling out that philosophy courses were still available, almost like fish mongers hawking the fresh intellectual catch of the day (even though you knew their wares were millennia old). St. Francis Xavier University was still a very Catholic place, but theology and philosophy were increasingly marginal disciplines even there. The …And Philosophy series, then, can be seen as a survival strategy.

Meanwhile, many of us would sit in the TV lounge on our floor in residence and watch a steaming hot pot of Monty Python’s Flying Circus come to a boil, never contemplating that when we watched a skit with two people having a debate about whether they were arguing or merely engaging in a series of contradictions we were learning just a tetch of philosophy and logic. Other times we were catching our Saturday afternoon dose of Star Trek where characters debated the nature of being truly human in every single episode.

Would knowing that we were learning have spoiled the fun? Maybe. But there’s no reason why we can’t be entertained and then, on second viewing, be educated. The …And Philosophy series gives us an opportunity to clarify what we’ve seen through the lens of philosophy. If we resist looking closely at our entertainment, it could be because we want so much to escape from all meaning. And that in itself says something about our lives. If we had to examine our favorite movies and TV shows, then we would have to ask why we’ve chosen them and not other movies and shows. Then we would have to examine ourselves. And that is harder than any philosophy course and there is no book coming out called [insert your name here] and Philosophy to help you understand yourself.