Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [27]
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Philosophy at Play
RACHAEL SOTOS
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) said that the history of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. And now we may add Stephen Colbert to the long list of Plato-footnoters.
This isn’t because Stephen Colbert—either the character or the man—has written treatises explicating Plato’s theory of the immortal forms (the Ideas), but rather because Colbert’s TV show performs philosophy four nights a week. The Colbert Report doesn’t merely entertain, but by engaging our intellectual and emotional faculties in fun, it plays with us in a spirit that Plato and his primary character, Socrates, would recognize and approve.
Not only did Plato theorize the immortal ideas, write philosophical dialogues, and sketch the numerous puzzles which have kept professional thinkers occupied for millennia; he was also a great proponent of play. Indeed Plato considered a playful attitude an essential feature of the philosophical quest for truth, and playful activities essential to the human capacity to be free in any truly worthwhile sense. To take one of many examples, in Plato’s dialogue, The Laws, he invites his readers to conceive of life itself as a kind of play and, “to imagine that each of us living creatures is a puppet made by the gods, possibly as a mere plaything, or possibly with some more serious purpose” (Laws, line 644d).
But perhaps the claim that we’re playthings of higher powers appears contrary to human freedom and responsibility? The puppet metaphor isn’t intended to wish away responsibility, but rather, by revealing the “cords or strings by which we are worked,” the philosopher teaches us how to be free. Plato invites us to imagine that within each “puppet” there are competing counselors and conflicting expectations; individuals are variously pulled toward “pleasure” and away from “pain;” diversely directed by “hope” and “courage,” but also by “fear.” Some of the strings are “hard and brittle,” but some are “soft,” such as the “golden” cord pulling us toward what is truly lawful and just (the common good). By learning to dance in harmony with the latter golden cord we exercise our own judgment in a manner which is “gentle and free from violence” (lines 644-645a). In short, we learn how to be truly free.
It’s in such a playful Platonic spirit that The Colbert Report performs philosophy: by engaging our preconceptions of what is to be hoped for and feared, the just and the true, virtue and sin, it reveals the extent to which we are determined and the conditions in which we might best thrive and grow. Stephen Colbert, the quintessential plaything of higher (and often lower) powers, entertains us and simultaneously teaches us to be free.
Play and Seriousness
Few philosophers blur the line between play and seriousness like Plato. In his writings on both politics and ethics, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Plato’s own student, stands with “seriousness” against “mere play.” In contrast to Plato’s divine playthings, Aristotle offers the model of “the serious man,” the “spoudaios.” Translators often mistakenly render the term with “the good man,” but this does not capture Aristotle’s emphasis, the authority conveyed in the Greek verb spoudadzo: to be busy, serious, earnest, grave. As Eric Voegelin, an acute philosophical commentator, remarks: “It would perhaps be better to speak of the serious, or weighty man; or, in order to oppose him to the ‘young man’ who is unfit for ethical debate, one might call the spoudaios the mature man, or the man who has attained full human stature.”49
Aristotle details the perfect specimen of seriousness in his account of the “magnanimous” or “great-souled man,” “the megalopsychos .” Such a serious, weighty man is one who “walks slowly and speaks in a deep voice.”50 Such a “perfect,” “mature” man certainly need not imagine himself a puppet, for he is one conveyed by his own