PvI#126: Waiting for Cluckman w/ Anthony LeBlanc

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. 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 dollar or whatever to get the remaining bonus content. You can choose to watch this on unedited video: 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!