How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (23 page)

¹
Marilyn Friedman, “Autonomy, Social Disruption, and Women,” in
Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self
, edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 37.

²
Sarah Buss, “Personal Autonomy,”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
<
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy
>.

³
Nicomachean Ethics
, Book II.

⁴
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development
(Harvard University Press, 1982).

⁵
Russ Shafer-Landau,
The Fundamentals of Ethics
(Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 266.

12

The Legen . . . wait-for-it . . . dary Moment

M
ARYAM
B
ABUR

K
ids,
How I Met your Mother
is about a lot of things, and one of those things it's definitely about is the identity crisis, more commonly known as the mid- or quarter-life crisis. Even the sweethearts of the show, Lilypad and Marshmallow, have had their bouts of uncertainty and confusion.

Remember when Lily accepted an art fellowship in San Francisco, strangely conflicting with her and Marshall's original wedding dates? As Ted pointed out when he caught a $90 cab ride out into the middle of nowhere to change Lily's flat tire, . . . wasn't this all a cry for help? To move away from the center of art and culture to the other side of the country . . . for an art fellowship? Lily admits she's just going to try, it's just an application to see if she can get in, just a little experience, there's nothing to worry about! And she speeds off, leaving Ted behind at the side of the road.

After using two teenagers to get into a high-school prom just to get a chance to hear The 88, the band Marshall wanted to hire for their wedding, Lily remembered the girl she used to be and realized that she hadn't become all that she'd expected. In fact, she was becoming exactly the opposite of what she wanted: she was walking into being tied down. Her freedom was at stake. And she had to go. Now. And so Lily gets her fellowship and moves off to San Francisco, ready to breathe some newness into her life.

Marshall, on the other hand, was self-destructing in another way. His quarter-life crisis revolves around responsibility. He overburdens himself by taking an internship at Barney's notorious
corporation, later to be known as Goliath National Bank. The monstrous corporation, going against all of Marshall's idealist environmental morals and aspirations, is giving Marshall the opportunity to offer Lily the whole package. (As if his isn't big enough.) He drags himself to the internship, and later, through a full-time job, unable to see his freedom. Only responsibility lies ahead.

So that's some of Lily and Marshall's bouts of confusion. . . . And yet in terms of confusion and identity crises, Barney, Ted, and Robin seem to be even worse off. While Ted and Robin seem to be floating from partner to partner, and mostly, as becomes repeatedly evident, from one mismatch to the next, Barney's string of one-night stands is exactly what he's about. Though Ted and Robin seem to be the unwilling victims of self-doubt and confusion, Barney seems to know
exactly
what he's doing. Even though Barney has some mother issues, some father issues, and what comes across as a very unstable home and family environment, when it comes to who he is, Barney seems to be stable and secure in his conception of himself. And yet, you probably still have the tendency to think that Barney's brand of self-certainty is not completely convincing. Isn't he just as confused as the rest?

Old White Balding Men and Their Identity Fetish

Midlife crisis, quarter-life crisis, identity crisis, confusion, call it what you may, the old (mostly dead) white balding men's club we call philosophers have pondered over it for centuries. The Greeks, the medievals, the Renaissance men, the existentialists, the Marxists, and even today, the branches of neuro-philosophy, political philosophy, social philosophy, ethics—everyone wants a piece of that identity pie!

And yet, although so many philosophers come to mind while I'm trying to filter everything that's going on in that awesome show we know as
How I Met Your Mother
, two philosophers step up more than the rest for me: Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger.

Kierkegaard was a bit of an odd philosopher. First and foremost, because he died young,
and
he had a really nice head of hair. Oh yeah: and he was a Dane (not a very philosophically
fruitful country). He wrote many books and journals where some of the recurring themes are identity, existence, life, time, and that thing we call love. Ironically, his own love life was a shambles, he had father issues, and he kept publishing books he had written under strange pseudonyms, even though everybody already knew that he was the author (identity crisis anyone?). Also ironically, his first philosophical work, his dissertation, was on irony.

Heidegger became famous for his first book,
Being and Time
, which he republished seven times during his lifetime and never finished, always publishing it as a completed Part One, repeatedly stating that there would be a second part, and yet never writing it. In this book he focussed, much like Kierkegaard, on identity, existence, life, and time. He also published many other books thereafter on (amongst other topics) technology, art, and philosophy.

Heidegger led a controversial life. Besides having long-term mistresses, who just happened to be his Jewish students, this German also became a Nazi. And after the war was over, he never apologized for being a Nazi. He was definitely not a role model; something which can place his philosophy in a very negative light. I know it's tempting, but let's not focus too much on that.

Dude, Just Be Yourself

Returning to
How I Met Your Mother
. To my mind, just as
How I Met Your Mother
is all about midlife crises, it's also all about figuring it all out—“Dude, just be yourself!” seems to be the underlying message. Ted's narrating the story to his kids, so there's got to be some underlying lessons to be learned, right? Similarly, Kierkegaard's all about being who you are, as a ‘singular individual', or as that unique person that you are. And Heidegger's all about the same, which he calls ‘authenticity' (such a Ted and Karen word, I know).

We'll come to Kierkegaard, but let's start off with Heidegger. The strange thing is, Heidegger's whole book
Being and Time
is supposed to be about the universe, as explained through existence (being) and time. But right from the start, he claims that the only way to figure out what being is all about is to ask ourselves what do we always already know about being? For
when we say something ‘is' something else, we imply that we already know something about what ‘is' is.
¹

By saying this, he rejects all the philosophers before him (yes, that's why they and we can be such an arrogant breed). He argues that philosophers shouldn't focus on what makes an object an object. What we really should be talking about is people. That's because we humans are the ones who actually reflect on existence in the first place, thereby making the existence of objects and even our own existence, a problem that needs solving. So studying what it means to be us is the best gateway to figuring out what being in general is all about (suspense killer: remember how Heidegger never finished his book? He never wrote part two where he was supposed to figure out the ‘universe's' side of the equation).

So, You're Telling Me Women (or Men for That Matter) Aren't Objects?

Barney, reading this heading, would probably not be pleased! But that people aren't objects is one of the first topics Heidegger covers in
Being and Time
. He begins making his point by making a bold move as a philosopher. He doesn't launch his investigation with sky-high ideals, instead, he just focusses, first and foremost, on life as it is (warning: in really very convoluted terms. He even makes up words. But he should get credit for ‘just keepin' it real' in the end). This type of approach is called phenomenology: he looks at the world, and claims that if he looks deep enough, and at the right things, or ‘phenomena', something will reveal itself. These underlying secrets to life that are revealed, will actually end up always being things we already know, which he's just going to bring to the surface. He wants to express what's implicit in everyday life.

So what does he do first? He begins with a toilet (okay, actually it's a hammer, but toilets make more sense for all of us non-carpenters). He says that if we really consider it, we never really talk about the being of toilets. Really, we just use them. It's only when the toilet suddenly doesn't flush—that's when we actually start thinking about the toilet as an object rather than something we use. Unlike other philosophers, he's not going
to theorize about what it is about the toilet that defines it for what it is (made of porcelain, a certain shape, and so forth).

Heidegger goes on to argue that all the objects around us make up a network of equipment, and equipment isn't really anything concrete; rather, we could define ‘equipment' abstractly as “something in order to” (p. 97). Toilets aren't really toilets, they're these, often porcelain, things that fit into our environment of a bathroom, which fits into our idea of a building, which fits into our idea of a place to live, which . . . If we continue that line of thought, we realize that everything around us really just fits into our network of ideas of our environment. And if we reach the end of that line of thought, we realize that it's all about us in the end; we are the ‘for-the-sake-of-which' of the totality of equipment, as Heidegger would say (p. 116). We make objects what they are, giving them meaning; they're there for us, it would seem. I can just imagine Marshall and Ted in their dorm, eating a sandwich and thinking “Whooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.”

But Heidegger doesn't stop there. He says that we humans normally go on living life just doing what humans do. We rarely stop to think about who we are. We're just reading the paper as humans do, fantasizing about Robin as Teds do, buying bread from the baker—okay the supermarket—as people do. For the most part, we're in our instrumental mode of being: using things and in a different sense, using others. And we're doing so in the way everyone else does. Heidegger calls this
Das Man
or ‘The They', which comes close to the hippy idea of ‘The Man' telling us what to do all the time. And yet, no one's really telling anyone to do anything. Heidegger argues that we're mostly the ‘not-I', or not ourselves: we're ‘inauthentic' (p. 167). This, you can imagine, is a big problem for Heidegger, who, to my mind, is all about being yourself and being authentic. This ‘they', it's not someone, not someone else, nor some people, nor the sum of all people—it's everyone and yet no one at all (p. 164).

And worst of all, this monster is a part of all of us, and who we normally are every day. And perhaps even worse or more monstrous, this thing that we all are becomes a way to shirk our responsibilities in life; specifically, it becomes a way to shirk our responsibility to just be who we are (p. 165). It's so easy to not be accountable for anything if it's not you who did it; I mean, c'mon, everybody's doing it! Yes high-fiving is back
because James says it's back, and he's just doing what everybody knows is back in. Duh.

At the same time, Heidegger tells us something even stranger: authenticity is just a modification of inauthenticity (p. 224). Meaning, to my mind, that not-being ourselves is in some way essential to being ourselves. Even when we are who we are, we still have to read the paper and buy bread. We just can't think about who we really are all the time.

Anxiety

And what happens when we get wrenched out of our normal and somewhat necessary state of absorption in life (p. 220), and are suddenly surprised and confronted with the question: “Who am I really?” Anxiety happens. Yes, it's the stuff of midlife crises.

Heidegger realizes that at some point in time, we're bound to be confronted with
Angst
or anxiety. In anxiety, nothing really makes sense anymore, because we realize everything revolves around us. You realize that toilets are not just toilets, but rather some kind of bookmark of understanding this world you've been given. And really, you could just hang a toilet up on the wall and call it art and that would be okay. So why use them—defecate in them?!! In anxiety, nothing makes sense anymore and you feel detached. Suddenly who you are and your life as you live it lack meaning. And it can be scary, intimidating, nerve-wracking. But what are you scared of in this free-floating diarrhea-like state? Heidegger says: you're shrinking back in fear of yourself (pp. 230–31).