Philosophy vs. Improv

Mark, Mary, and Jenny are joined by improviser Anthony to restore us to a 2 X 2 Team Play balance, again reading part of Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire as a way of exploring ancient yet still popular traditions by which one might use philosophy for self-improvement.

In the course of introducing Nussbaum’s ideas, we act out and/or discuss vacation portal polyamory, voluntarily living in dangerous places, life return bureaucracy, risk bricks, connecting the classroom to the real world, and the first weekly check-in of the robots’ revolution scheduling society.

We’ve all read the first half of Ch. 1, “Therapeutic Arguments” to talk generally about the rule of the master vs. the student in what is now considered a self-help activity. What wisdom does the teacher (or book, or podcast, if you’re just informing yourself) convey? Nussbaum casts the therapeutic approach as midway between two approaches to ethics: First, she characterizes Plato as giving us the idea that “the good” might just be something objective and not necessarily tied with any of our intuitions or tendencies. For example, the good is what God wants us to do, and this might require completely upending what we might “naturally” do. Self-improvement would involve learning about this objective standard and striving to follow it.

On the other extreme is the “natural language argument” view that the good is just whatever society says. So you might personally fall short of social expectations (How pretty must you be? How diligent?), and the self-improvement goal would be to seek to improve in those socially prescribed ways.

The middle way here is trying to fulfill your internal purpose: to be the real you, to figure out what you really want (which is the same as what you should want given your particular character and the kind of being you are), and work toward that goal. Nussbaum gives the example of working with women in India who claim to be satisfied, but whose health outcomes are objectively lower than those of men. When they are brought to realize this, they see that they can and should have more than their society has granted them, that there is an excellence available to them that was being ignored by their default programming.

The medical traditions often characterize this as a return to nature, in that a repressive society can tamp down one’s natural tendencies of growth. Of course, it’s not really a return to culture-free nature, as having no help from other people and institutions would be even less conducive to fulfilling one’s potential. As humans, culture is our second nature; it is natural for us to be in and to require a culture to nurture us.

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Image note: Given that we’re talking about therapeutic arguments, I asked Gemini to give me a chicken on a psychotherapist’s couch. Initially it volunteered some dialogue bubbles, like the doctor saying “how’s the farm,” so I asked it to get rid of that, and this is the result. Do people generally have a clipboard on the couch with them when in therapy? Is it at foot level because they write with their feet? The mysteries of artificial intelligence!

Mark, Mary, and now new co-host Jus’ Jenny begin our new endeavor that includes reading Martha Nussbaum’s book The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994). We read the introduction of that for this session, but YOU certainly don’t have to read it. (Though we encourage this; if you just search the web for the title and “pdf,” I’m betting you’ll find a version you can follow along with, though I would not be so disregarding of Martha’s intellectual property to provide you with such a link.)

The point is to reflect on, over the next several months, the classical traditions of what we would now call the self-help movement but what they considered to be clinical philosophy: Using philosophical truths to live more rationally, happily, and productively. And if that sounds like BS cult sales talk, yes, that’s exactly what we need to guard ourselves against. Bringing in Nussbaum, an undisputedly A-list philosopher, as our virtual guide should help here.

We hear about Mary’s AA experience and what her stereotypes about philosophy are. We act out some puddle self-improvement and a dirty poetry slam. How do you teach a feeling, like the feeling that enough is enough and this improv scene should end already?

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Here’s the relevant scene explaining the episode title from The Jerk. Here’s that episode of The Partially Examined Life about Sartre on race. And here’s the PEL interview with Nussbaum herself.

Image note: My MidJourney subscription has officially gone, so as with the previous couple of episodes, I’m getting our images from Google Gemini, which in this case has delivered upon my request to depict single-celled organisms in a puddle, and as in our scene, they are all apparently happy, though this was not part of my query. WHAT SECRETS DOES GEMINI KNOW ABOUT THE MICRO WORLD THAT IT ATTRIBUTES TO IT SUCH JOY??!!

In between seasons here, we’ve got some business, which is that not too long after our Redacted episode, I did a follow-up episode with that same acting coach, my old high school classmate Dave, who runs Actor Class off of Times Square, after many years acting, directing, and writing plays. He was also the lead in the Partially Examined Life reading of Life Is a Dream, a play that he recommended to us for its philosophical content.

He did not react well to the standard PvI format, so instead I just interviewed him about his career and his insights about Broadway, Shakespeare, contemporary entertainment, theory in acting, and more.

This was recorded back in July, so our references to the film Apex were current at the time! …And the Odyssey had not yet come out.

I begin and end this recording with some musing about this free-form format and what the PEL universe might do in the future regarding drama.

Next episode we’ll be kicking off the new PvI season, with our new format, new (additional) hosts, stay tuned!

Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes (not this one), now absolutely free, or kick in a dollar or whatever to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode.

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We wrap up Mary’s first year with the podcast, and changes are afoot for our upcoming season, but why? Let’s explore to the point of physical discomfort! We act out an odd annual employee review, a dramatic pitch for a new play, and the navel-gazing club.

We talk about celebrating and escalating, high points of season 5, how comedy is never a matter of “trying to be funny” but grows out of authentic experience, Mary’s dramatic history, making unpleasant characters redemptive, Morbius, our wish lists for the future , and more. Get started reading Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire now.

Image note: This was my second try with Google Gemini, and in this case it initially generated an image for “performance evaluation” that was way too detailed and (as is inevitably the case with these AIs, looked like it was drawn FOR children instead of drawn BY children), so I asked it for the same but cruder, and so it left out some details and misspelled some words, as I guess AIs “think” that children do.

Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes (including this one), now absolutely free, or kick in a dollar or whatever to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode.

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Future co-host philosophy Jenny joins past co-host improviser Bill along with the usual rabble (Mark and Mary) for some tag-team mud swimming, hot takes about The Odyssey (we recorded this on July 23), and discussion and play about Bill’s return to school, Maslow’s hierarchy, gamified syllabi, some dweeby math stuff, and academic dishonesty. Our shared conversation space shall now be referred to as THE CAVE. Don’t worry: No clips from the hit show The Lazy Pedophiles were included in this show.

When Jenny becomes a full co-host (in addition to Mark and Mary), she will have a better microphone and no longer sound like she’s broadcasting from a puddle. Here are some Mbappe memes that she mentions at the end.

Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes (including this one), now absolutely free, or kick in a dollar or whatever to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode.

Image Note: I’ve come to the conclusion that MidJourney bites, and I will not be renewing my paid subscription to it when it comes up in October. This “brain taking a shower” image was generated by Google Gemini (the free version), and though it still doesn’t look per my request like a child actually drew this, unlike Midjourney, it didn’t get all pretentious. So suck it, MidJourney.

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AmirAli is a philosophy researcher who runs the Persian-language philosophy blog Praxis Publication and tries to make Islamic philosophy speak to and with the West. In this, his first international podcast appearance, we hear about doing philosophy in the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” life during wartime, the relationship between play and philosophy, Islamic philosophy in Arabic vs. Persian (and Farsi, English, etc.), Amanah (Persian for “sacred trust”), philosophy as empathy, plus the Dream Police and fun with imperialism.

Read AmirAli’s posts on the Strait of Hormuz, hermeneutics, tyranny, and understanding the “enemy” during wartime.

Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolutely free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode.

Sponsor: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code IMPROV at oneskin.co/IMPROV.

Image Note: The painting here was snatched from an article about Iranian children winning an international painting contest. AmirAli no doubt shares the dream of this illustrator that the trees of all different colors join hands, and the animals with the animals, and the people with the people, but that those three groups shall remain ever parallel and unconnected. I’m pretty sure that was Leibniz’s view.

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The LA-based clown, multimedia performance artist, and doll stylist (see maddiemutations.com; she also goes by the name Maddie Forrest) joins Mary and Mark to talk about her Doll Court show, clown types and the role of the fool, failing on stage, cities as women, silly villains, and more.

Will Carol overcome her anxiety to go into the big meeting? Will Maddie keep all the nice dolls to herself? What should the demands of the LA doll union be? How edgy can a clown be? We wrap up with an exercise about numeric levels of joy.

Follow @maddiemutations. Some things she brought up are the Tiny Baby Talk Show and a Clown class she recommends.

Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolutely free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode.

Sponsor: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code IMPROV at oneskin.co/IMPROV.

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Your wise and authoritative hosts explore forms of respectful address, what counts as good philosophy, the holodeck full-contact Fantasy Island experience, status in economic transactions, Trek not War, default improv scenarios, fear of playfulness, philosophy or improv as education vs. doing philosophy or improv, and more.

The potential future textbook I suggested at the end is Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire.

Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolutely free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode.

Image note: When I asked Midjourney to simply draw me “struggle club,” it unambiguously interpreted this as involving set-upon African-Americans. So I had to go with simply “child’s drawing of clubhouse,” and eventually got two figures out of it.

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What would PvI be with zero masculine energy? This episode features your usual co-host Mary Hynes and our frequent guest Jennifer Hansen (philosopher at St. Lawrence University). They have a one-on-one chat about being hot in a hostile world, interacting with AI, fighting with parrots, and they act out scenes involving the f*cks store and the actress who is too perfect. There is a lot of reclaiming one’s power and rejecting negativity and other things perhaps anathema to Mark’s sensibility, but you should tell us what YOU think.

Image Note: This was a silly idea of Mark’s prior to the actual recording, which should perhaps better be called “Tall Poppies,” or something like that, but it seems a legit feminist point to make that a la “Ms. Pac-Man,” there’s a weird presumption that non-human cartoon characters are by default male, and that the female product thus must be indicated by the addition of a feminine-coded cosmetic element.

Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolute free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode.

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Mark and Mary are joined by Andrea, an Italian teacher with a broad performing background who’s written a book of philosophical, poetic aphorisms called Think Town: self-help reflections and directives about fear, ego, happiness, etc.

There’s a long history of aphorisms in philosophy (Nietzsche, Heraclitus, Confucius, Laozi), and philosophy invented the self-help genre (the Stoics among others), but how does philosophy work given the lack of argumentation?

We explore the monster under the bed, AI agents, making philosophy personally applicable, being receptive, DOT ego secretions, and more.

Image Note: This is one of the options that MidJourney gave me given the directive to represent the concept of aphorisms. I was picturing, what, little dialogue bubbles with nonsense text in them? AI is clearly a bit disturbed here, and my demonstrating this is a good use of Tennessee lakes.

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Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolute free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode.