Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [15]
What George Sr. did in swindling shareholders wasn’t just morally wrong—it was legally wrong. Legal evaluations are a different type of normative evaluation than moral evaluations. Remember, according to George Michael, marrying your cousin was “almost made legal . . . we had the signatures.” Tobias’s cutoffs are waaaay too short, which is wrong—but this isn’t a moral evaluation. It’s an aesthetic evaluation. Aesthetics is the philosophical study of art and the nature of beauty. When we are grossed out by Tobias’s short shorts, we are making an aesthetic normative judgment.
Which brings us back to the yuck factor and the wisdom of repugnance. How are we to know that the yuckiness that we feel when confronted with an act of incest is a clue to a moral normative evaluation, rather than an aesthetic normative evaluation? Maybe it’s a clue to yet another type of normative evaluation. This isn’t a dismissal of the yuck factor or a denial that we find incest repugnant. But it is a call to question why we in fact believe the yuck factor indicates immorality. The sight of someone picking his nose is disturbing. So is Rudy Giuliani in a dress. Are we willing to say that being Paris Hilton is immoral or that picking your nose is immoral?
George Michael never seems to get a straight answer about anything. Philosophical arguments about whether he should hook up with Maeby—even if she is his cousin—aren’t forthcoming, either. It may have been morally wrong for George Michael to hook up with Maeby when he thought she was his cousin, but the Argument from Naturalism, the yuck factor, and the wisdom of repugnance haven’t cleared anything up. It’s enough to make you want to go out and invest in the Cornballer after all.
NOTE
1. Leon R. Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” reprinted in Bioethics: Principles, Issues, and Cases, ed. Lewis Vaughn, Oxford University Press (New York), 2010, p. 430.
Chapter 3
FREUDIAN ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Tim Jung
Analysts and Therapists for the Bluths
The Bluths need psychoanalysis. Everything from Lucille’s criticism to Maeby’s compulsive lying is indicative of deeper psychological issues. Even the two “good” members of the family, Michael and George Michael, experience difficulty keeping it together when it comes to their family’s often ridiculous or dangerous antics. But in spite of these serious character flaws, the Bluths still have a certain charm.
Why are the Bluths the way they are? What causes them to be so irrational? Why can’t Tobias see that the title on his business cards (“Analrapist”) is something more than a combination of analyst and therapist? Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) would claim that Tobias has unconscious ideas and urges that are making themselves known.
Use Your Allusion: Freud
The passions represent the irrational side of us that’s beyond our control, and, in turn, that pushes or drives us to act or think in ways that we had not intended. Consider the episode “Meat the Veals,” in which Ann’s mother, that “sweet piece of Veal,” is so overcome with passion that she demands that Michael take her to his secular world so that she may please him “secularly.”
Although Freud claimed to avoid philosophy,1 the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) clearly influenced Freud’s views about the irrational side of human nature. Earlier philosophers like David Hume (1711–1776) placed an important emphasis on the passions and human thought. But Freud took it to a new level, dedicating his life to studying the irrational side of human nature through what he called psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious.
Perhaps an Attic Shall I Seek—The Unconscious
Freud had two theories of how the mind was constructed. Freud’s original idea, the topography, consisted of the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious levels of the mind. The conscious is that which is readily available to us—what we are aware