Month: May 2019

The fundamental premise of the first bit of this essay is an exploration of the concept of “infinite debt” in Christian ethics, i.e. the idea that because God created everything, everyone who exists owes everything they have to God, which means every transgression against God cannot ever be repaid because everything was owed to God in the first place. This whole line of argument begs an important question: Why should gifts indebt someone to someone else? And also: Why is the arguer so eager to provide justification for any amount of heinous acts committed in the name of a nominally benevolent God? Someone with a relentlessly transactional approach to morality could reasonably come to the whole “infinite debt” conclusion without propping up authoritarianism in the name of God, but in practice most Christians end up in one of two categories (three, if we count the “I only go on Easter and Christmas” types whose beliefs impact their actions so little that they’re basically atheists anyway): The “what would Jesus do” types who use God as an example to live up to, and the ones who imagine God as their personal attack dog, allowing them to get the last word in every argument by subjecting everyone who makes them angry to a thousand years of torment. If someone starts expounding upon how you are infinitely in God’s debt, it’s pretty good odds you’re talking to the second type.

A related concept is the idea that only God, who did not owe anything to himself, could incarnate and build up goodwill with which to pay the debt on behalf of humanity. This is dumb. If God can repay the debt to himself on behalf of other people, he can also just forgive the debt.

Kierkegaard makes this point, the next section of the essay explains, that it seems weird to ascribe ethics based entirely on accounting to an allegedly omnibenevolent God, that it is utterly bizarre that the Christian God, of all people, should be so stringently opposed to the concept of forgiving debts.

The essay then wanders through a few more ethical frameworks for Christianity: Being a good Christian means helping other people, love one another and all that. But then aren’t we all destined to fail, even if we have the preternatural ability to always choose correctly? Sooner or later we’re gonna have to pick between helping one person and helping another, and then we’ve failed to help someone no matter what we do. Maybe being a good Christian is fulfilling Christian morals, but apparently true selflessness requires suffering and being generous simply because you like helping people doesn’t count for some reason.

But mostly there’s a lot of gobbledygook that’s trying way too hard to be profound. Like this:

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) called the kind of infinity we are dealing with here a bad infinity (schlechte Unendlichkeit), one that is characterized by everlasting lack, rather like the line that can be extended indefinitely, yet never finds completion anywhere. Against this bad infinite, Hegel set the true infinite, which signifies a fullness of being, of which God as described by Anselm forms the exemplar.11 Such a superior kind of infinity is like the circle, ever complete in itself, and it is toward this sort of fulfillment that we should strive.

Now, in context, this paragraph makes sense. But in context, this paragraph is also irrelevant and can be cut from the essay completely with no consequences. As far as I can tell, Taneli Kukkonen just wanted to talk about lines and circles for a bit. The essay relies a lot on use of metaphor in place of argument, saying X is like Y, and then founding the next two pages of discussion on the assumption that this is true without ever bothering to justify the metaphor. In the end, this essay is terribly concerned with sounding profound and not so concerned with communicating ideas, and the further into its length it goes, the more it disappears up its own ass and comes unmoored from the more salient points being made by the philosophers its quoting. Anselm’s “infinite debt” might be a bad idea, but at least it is an idea, clearly stated.

We’re returning to the Pop Culture and Philosophy series for this one, firmly cementing this series as good standbys to bust out whenever I can’t think of what else to read in time to get a post out. This time we’re looking at Spider-Man and Philosophy, whose first essay is given to us by Neil Musset, returning to us from D&D&P, where he wrote a pretty good examination of the philosophy of the origins of evil that was marred by his insistence that the definition of Chaotic Evil given to him by a guy he knew in high school was and should remain absolutely universal no matter how poorly it matched up not to just one, but to every philosophy of the origin of evil he examined. But really, if you’re going to get either the “Philosophy” or the “Dungeons and Dragons” bit wrong in Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy, you’re better off messing up the latter to get the former right, so while it is flawed, I still think Neil Musset’s previous essay was a good read. Also, I call it “previous,” but Spider-Man and Philosophy was 2012 and D&D&P was 2014, so we’re actually going back in time here.

Neil Musset is taking the same basic strategy here as with D&D&P, in that he examines multiple different philosophical interpretations of some philosophical subject through the lens of Spider-Man. As the title suggests, our philosophical subject this time is what it means to live a good life, and our lens is whether Peter Parker has one.

Philosopher number one is Paul Kurtz, who believes that the ancient Greek dispute between the hedonists – who believed happiness was pleasure – and the eudaemonists – who believed that happiness was excellence – was missing the point, and happiness is actually having both of those things. But Peter Parker is pretty short in the pleasure department, what with his financial troubles, his romantic troubles, his academic troubles, and so on. On Paul Kurtz’s count, Peter Parker isn’t living a good life.

I don’t know why Ayn Rand was included. She’s not generally well regarded in the philosophical community, anyone with the barest knowledge of her ethics knows that Spider-Man stands in more stark opposition to them than perhaps any other similarly popular character, and while you would still want to include her in an absolutely exhaustive analysis of philosophy, I double checked Wikipedia and it turns out there are more than five philosophers in history.

Epictetus is the most famous of the Stoic school of philosophy, whose fundamental belief regarding happiness is that only you can choose whether or not to be happy. Most people who parrot similar phrases today tend to shut up when you ask them whether they think Holocaust victims were just a bunch of whiners, but Epictetus was a slave taken from his homeland and hobbled in captivity, so while he never saw the industrial horrors of modern atrocity, he’s definitely had a legitimately difficult life and isn’t bullshitting when he says he believes that happiness is always a choice that someone makes for themselves. When he says “happiness is something you can choose to feel,” he doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be held responsible for his actions because his victims are ultimately responsible for the unhappiness he’s caused them, he means that he reminds himself every day that every pleasant thing he has, right down to his friends and family, could perish tomorrow, and ultimately he will be okay with that. Peter Parker, according to Epictetus, chooses unhappiness by wishing for a stable relationship with Mary Jane, wishing to keep his Aunt May safe, and wishing for academic (and perhaps financial) success.

On the other hand, Epictetus’ tales of stoically enduring having his leg broken in slavery are of unknown veracity (we know he was hobbled, but accounts differ as to how), whereas Viktor Frankl was verifiably a victim of the Holocaust. Viktor Frankl’s theory of happiness is an expansion upon the Nietzschean theory “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” a quote that Viktor Frankl was fond of. To Viktor, meaning is the root of happiness. Suffering with meaning is sacrifice, and makes life richer. Spider-Man is undeniably leading a good life according to Viktor Frankl, because he finds meaning in the good he does. If he didn’t, he would stop. There’s no outside force compelling him to keep going, after all. If he wanted to stop being Spider-Man he could. He’s even tried a couple of times, but he can’t stick to it, because using his powers for good is what gives his life meaning. He feels bad if he doesn’t.

Aquinas took Aristotle’s virtue ethics and swapped in medieval Christian virtues for the ancient Greek ones Aristotle used. Given how medieval Christendom worked out for all involved, you might think the result was pretty barbaric, but the virtues enshrined by medieval Christendom were things like “charity” and “humility.” Feudalism was more responsible for how much the middle ages sucked than Christianity (Renaissance Christianity, on the other hand, was so corrupt that 80s movie villains would find the level of cruel decadence to be distastefully gauche). Because Aristotle’s view is that being virtuous is living a good life, and because Peter’s right in line with the specific list of virtues Aquinas supplied to that system, Aquinas would argue that Peter Parker is indeed leading a good life. Also, Neil Mussett does a whole lot of fanboying over Aquinas in this bit, but it’s not so bad that it makes the philosophy impenetrable, so other than being a little distracting, it doesn’t really impact the experience.

Neil Mussett’s formula for these is really effective and a whole book that just relentlessly drove it into the ground would probably turn out better than FFP and D&D&P did, just because there’s enough philosophers and philosophical questions to ask that you could probably pump out fifteen essays in this format without running out of material. Using a fictional character to examine a bunch of different philosophers’ takes on the same basic question is pretty much exactly what these pop philosophy books should be doing.