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, whom I can now reveal to be my old high-school classmate David L. Epstein, 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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