Playtest is the tragedy of happy-go-lucky Cooper, who travels the world to escape the pain of his family, where his father has died of Alzheimers. The real adventure comes at the end of his trip, when to make money for his return home he volunteers to test a new, virtual horror game. By probing his brain, this game anticipates his fears and subjects him to them one by one. But what is his deepest fear? It isn't spiders or his high-school bully, as it turns out, but instead the annihilation of himself. That was the fate not only of his father, but also of Greek tragic heroes, such as Sophocles' Oedipus. Tragedy is the highest cultural form, according to Nietzsche, because this is also our inevitable fate. In this conversation we discuss horror, tragedy, Nietzsche, and the peculiar genre of this episode.

Guest: Christopher Mountenay

How should we live with our suffering? Can we save ourselves from it through knowing? Are we doomed to self-deception? Or can we save ourselves through illusion and fantasy -- whether on the public stage or in the private theater of our mind? Nietzsche and Freud offer parallel answers to these questions, both drawing on the tragic story of a clever king, Oedipus, who could investigate and understand everything but himself.

Recommended Readings: Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy

https://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Tragedy-Writings-Cambridge-Philosophy/dp/0521639875

Freud's On Dreams

https://www.amazon.com/By-Sigmund-Freud-On-Dreams/dp/B00N4G1B5U

 Fifteen Million Merits presents a dystopia where most people ride stationary bicycles to generate its electricity. Although not exactly enslaved, they are motivated to keep riding by the merits they earn for their mileage -- which can be used to buy only necessities and baubles -- and the prospect of being demoted to custodial work if they stop. Most are alienated from their work, distracted only by meaningless entertainment that ranges from the cruel to the pornographic. Into this allegory of capitalism enter Bing and Abby, who test whether beauty and love provide enough reality and meaning to escape. In this conversation, we use Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx -- but especially Hegel -- to understand their situation.

Aristotle argues that there are natural slaves, people who are suited by nature to be commanded by other men. Their natural masters can live virtuous lives, consummated by philosophical contemplation, while slaves work to produce the necessary goods. Hegel believes that masters and slaves are made not by nature but by history's struggle for recognition and status, which every human being craves. Marx adopts Hegel's reasoning to argue that in an era of industrial capitalism laborers are tantamount to slaves: alienated from their work, each other, and their very selves. All three theories turn on a crucial distinction in Aristotle between three types of human doing. 

Recommended Readings: 

Aristotle: Metaphysics, 1048b20-35; Nicomachean Ethics 10.4, 1174a13-b7

https://amzn.to/34fYFvK

Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit, B.IV.A "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage" (pp. 111-19)

https://amzn.to/3c0KFc3

Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Estranged Labor" pp. 70-81); Capital, Volume 1.1.1.4, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof"  (pp. 319-29)

https://amzn.to/2VaNEaL

Nosedive exaggerates our obsession with social media. It shows how a whole society might be led to seek social status above all. By smiling, conforming, and betraying her better judgment, its main character seeks only to improve her social score. Two people try to liberate her from this enslavement to social status, but in the end she is freed from it only after she loses it -- and everything else she thought she wanted.

Amanda Lowe getintotherapy.com/aboutme

Karin Arndt drkarinarndt.com/

Plato's political theory is about the "constitutions" of societies. But a constitution (politeia in Greek) is how something is organized, and he also notices that there are parallels between how societies and souls are constituted. For example, societies organized around status (as if status were the best thing in life) tend to be populated by people who love status above all. So too for money. Education is the link. Societies reproduce themselves by educating people in their image.  

Recommended Readings: Plato, Republic 8, 543a1 - 555b1

https://amzn.to/2TVdL4W

Psych-ology is a Greek word meaning account (logos) of the soul (psyche). In this sense, the "soul" is whatever moves us by desire. But Plato observes that we are moved, sometimes in opposite directions, by three different sorts of desire: for wisdom, for status, and for money. There are basically three types of people according to which of these desires is strongest in the soul: wisdom-lovers (philo-sophers), status-lovers, and money-lovers. 

Recommended Readings:

Plato's Republic (Book 4, 436b7 - 441c2; Book 9, 588b9 - e2)

https://amzn.to/2TVdL4W

Bandersnatch allows the viewer to make choices for the main character. It is therefore as much a game as it is a standard story. What is the difference? In standard stories, the character is determined to act as the writer has scripted him. In a game we are free to determine alternative actions for him. He is thus still determined, by us. We viewers feel free. But are we, really? Do we want to be? 

Guest: Stuart Candy https://design.cmu.edu/user/1459

Are we free? Do we want to be? Gorgias argues that our actions are out of our control: we are susceptible to fate, or the gods, or physical force, or the seductive words of clever speakers -- such as himself. Dostoevsky, or rather one of his characters, tells a story arguing that for humans freedom is burdensome, so that anyone who sought to liberate us would in fact be harming us.  

Recommended Readings:

Gorgias's Encomium of Helen: https://fla.st/2Ifp4j9

Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" from The Brothers Karamazov

http://bit.ly/38hY5xV

The idea of God is the invention of a clever politician who saw that people are more thoroughly controlled by manipulation of their minds than they are by force upon their bodies. Foucault applies this insight (from Critias, but also Plato) to modern society.

Recommended Readings:

Critias fragment: http://bit.ly/31y2YRT

Foucault, "Panopticism," Discipline and Punish (3.3):

http://bit.ly/38aRuX0

https://amzn.to/31A5eI9