The Big Bang Theory and Philosophy

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Aristotle, Locke

Dean A. Kowalski, William Irwin

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118074558
• eBook ISBN: 9781118236413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A lighthearted meditation on the philosophical quandaries of the hit television show The Big Bang Theory

Ever wonder what Aristotle might say about the life Sheldon Cooper leads? Why Thomas Hobbes would applaud the roommate agreement? Who Immanuel Kant would treat with "haughty derision" for weaving "un-unravelable webs?" And—most importantly—whether Wil Wheaton is truly evil? Of course you have. Bazinga!

This book mines the deep thinking of some of history's most potent philosophical minds to explore your most pressing questions about The Big Bang Theory and its nerdy genius characters. You might find other philosophy books on science and cosmology, but only this one refers to Darth Vader Force-chokes, cloning Leonard Nimoy, and oompa-loompa-like engineers. Fo-shizzle.

• Gives you irresistibly geek-worthy insights on your favorite Big Bang Theory characters, story lines, and ideas
• Examines important themes involving ethics and virtue, science, semiotics, religion, and the human condition
• Brings the thinking of some of the world's greatest philosophers to bear on The Big Bang Theory, from Aristotle and Plato to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Simone de Beauvoir, and more

Essential reading for every Big Bang Theory fan, this book explores whether comic-book-wielding geeks can lead the good life, and whether they can know enough science to "tear the mask off nature and stare at the face of God."

PART ONE

“IT ALL BEGAN ON A WARM SUMMER’S EVENING IN GREECE”: ARISTOTELIAN INSIGHTS

Chapter 1

ARISTOTLE ON SHELDON COOPER: ANCIENT GREEK MEETS MODERN GEEK

Greg Littmann

If I may be permitted to speak again, Doctor Sheldon Cooper for the win.

—Dr. Sheldon Cooper, “The White Asparagus Triangulation”

Should you live like Sheldon Cooper? Think hard, because you don’t have the luxury of not making a choice. Fourteen billion years after the Big Bang, evolution has finally produced a type of animal, human beings, that must choose how it will live. As Sheldon himself points out in “The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization,” “We have to take in nourishment, expel waste, and inhale enough oxygen to keep our cells from dying. Everything else is optional.” Should we devote ourselves to learning more about the world around us? Is it alright to spend vast amounts of time reading comics or watching television? Would it be better to neglect our social lives so that we can spare more time for other things? The geeky life of a Sheldon may be a new option in human history, but the question of how we should live is a very ancient one.

In this chapter, we’ll examine the question of how we should live by asking how the life of Sheldon stacks up against the ideal set forth by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, one of the most influential thinkers of all times. The interesting thing about looking at Sheldon from Aristotle’s perspective is the degree to which this ancient conception of living well is fulfilled by a very modern geek such as Sheldon. The goal here is not to take Aristotle as a guru whose answers must be accepted, but to cast light on our condition to help us consider for ourselves the most important question we face: “How should we live?” Before we bring on Aristotle, though, we had better start with the question “What is it to live the life of Sheldon?”

The Life of the Mind

Bernadette: Sheldon, when was the last time you got any sleep?

Sheldon: I don’t know. Two, three days. Not important. I don’t need sleep, I need answers. I need to determine where in this swamp of unbalanced formulas squateth the toad of truth.1

If there is one thing that sets Sheldon apart, it is that he has given his life over almost entirely to mental activity. He not only works with his mind, but when he isn’t working, he finds recreation in imagination and puzzle-solving. The idea of losing his intelligence frightens Sheldon more than the idea of losing his life. When Amy suggests in “The Thespian Catalyst” that he burn the memories of bad student evaluations from his brain with a laser, he refuses on the grounds that “One slip of the hand and suddenly I’m sitting in the Engineering Department building doodads with Wolowitz.”

In fact, Sheldon doesn’t identify with his body at all. He would as happily alter it as he would upgrade any machine. In “The Financial Permeability,” he reveals his hope that scientists will soon “develop an affordable technology to fuse my skeleton with adamantium like Wolverine.” By choice, he would abandon his body altogether. In “The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification,” he looks forward to “the singularity . . . when man will be able to transfer his consciousness into machines and achieve immortality.” Furthermore, he’s flattered to be told that he resembles C3PO, and one of his goals is to be a thinking satellite in geostationary orbit. Compare this to Raj’s attitude—although Raj would also be happy to upgrade to a different body, his ideal is not a body built for pure thought, but for pure pleasure. In “The Monopolar Expedition,” he muses, “My religion teaches that if we suffer in this life, we are rewarded in the next. Three months at the North Pole with Sheldon and I’m reborn as a well-hung billionaire with wings.”

Sheldon is largely happy to forgo mere bodily pleasures. It is true, he’s fussy about the condition of his body—his food must be exactly right, the temperature must be exactly right, he must be sitting on his cushion in his place on the couch. Yet his body is a distracting source of discontent, rather than a source of pleasure. Sex is particularly uninteresting to him. As he derisively notes in “The Dumpling Paradox,” all sex has to offer is “nudity, orgasms, and human contact.” In “The Cooper-Nowitzki Theorem,” Penny asks Leonard, “What’s his deal? Is it girls? Guys? Sockpuppets?” and Leonard confesses, “Honestly, we’ve been operating under the assumption that he has no deal.” In this regard, Sheldon thinks that the rest of us should be more like him. In “The Financial Permeability,” he says of Leonard, “My theory is that his lack of focus [on work] stems from an overdeveloped sex drive.” Sheldon holds the very idea of sex in such contempt that in “The Desperation Emanation,” he follows his offer to make love to Amy with a cry of “Bazinga!” Conversely, Leonard, Raj, and Howard see value in the pleasures of sex. Howard arguably regards his interest in sex as an essential feature of himself. In “The Nerdvana Annihilation,” when Penny tells Leonard, “It is the things you love that make you who you are,” Howard interjects, “I guess that makes me large breasts.”

The Ancient Greek and the Modern Geek

Sheldon: I’m a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains.

Penny: Who’s Radiohead?

Sheldon: I have a working knowledge of the important things.2

Is Sheldon right that the best life for a human being is a life of the intellect? Socrates (470–399 BCE), Plato (428–348 BCE), and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), just to tag ancient Greek philosophy’s “big three,” all stressed the importance of intellectual development and activity over indulging the body. The same is true of prominent ancient philosophical sects such as the Cynics, the Epicureans, and the Stoics.

Aristotle believed that you can tell the function of something from what it does best. A DVD player is the best thing for playing DVDs—that’s the function of a DVD player. A screwdriver is the best thing for unscrewing screws from the back of your TiVo to install a larger hard drive—screwing and unscrewing is the function of a screwdriver. A fish is the best at swimming, so it is the function of a fish to swim. A horse is the best at galloping, so galloping is the function of a horse.

Looked at from this perspective, humanity doesn’t seem to be good for much. Compared to the most capable animals in each category, we humans are slow, weak, clumsy, and oblivious—a slab of fresh, fatty meat on two useless little legs. What humans are relatively good at, though, is thinking. In fact, we are better at thinking than anything else in existence (yet, as far as we know). So our function is to think, and a life of thinking well habitually is the best life for a human being. Aristotle wasn’t suggesting that we should never exercise, never have sex, or otherwise refrain from bodily activity. Given the sort of creatures we are, that simply wouldn’t be practical. The body is there, however, to support a life of mental activity—it is mental activity that is the entire point of being human. Aristotle wrote “that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man.”3 Indeed, Aristotle thought that the ideal sort of existence would consist in nothing but pure thought, a life of uninterrupted Godlike contemplation.4 This sounds not so very different from Sheldon’s fantasy of being a mechanical satellite, thinking away in space. So, would Aristotle advise us to be like Sheldon? Is this the best life for a human being? The rise of geek culture has received too little attention from scholars of Aristotle, because the appearance and proliferation of geeky intellectuals such as Sheldon, Leonard, Raj, and Howard pose significant new problems for the Aristotelian account of living well. Geeks, after all, devote their intellectual activity to the weirdest things.

Some geeky obsessions, Aristotle would definitely applaud. Aristotle stressed the importance of observing and theorizing to learn more about the universe, and he wrote widely to spread his observations and theories about the world and the cosmos, contributing to biology, botany, logic, mathematics, and medicine. Enormously influential in the history of thought, he has as good a claim as anyone to being the father of science.

Aristotle said that the difference between the educated and the uneducated is as great as that between the living and the dead.5 So Sheldon’s and Leonard’s work in physics and Raj’s work in astronomy would impress Aristotle enormously, and he would respect Howard’s somewhat lesser Ph.D.-less education.

Aristotle would even approve of many of Sheldon’s obsessions that might seem the most ridiculous to someone without a curious mind. A discussion about “the scientific foundations of interstellar flight on a silver surf board,” as conducted in “The Excelsior Acquisition,” is an examination of the laws of physics, even if the motivation is unusual. Lectures on the correct undergarments for a medieval knight or what medieval bosoms would say if they could speak, as presented in “The Codpiece Topology,” rest on a mastery of history—a subject that Aristotle held in high regard. Even turning lights in China on and off over the Internet, as performed in “The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization,” is a scientific experiment of sorts, exploring the limits of new technology. Arguments over whether the Terminator can be part of a causal loop when time traveling, as discussed in “The Terminator Decoupling,” or whether Star Trek–style teleportation would constitute death, as considered in “The Jerusalem Duality,” concern very real and very important philosophical issues. It’s just that they use examples drawn from popular culture. Greek philosophers did that sort of thing all of the time, though. Aristotle, for instance, used Hector from the Iliad to investigate courage and Neoptolemus from Sophocles’ play Philoctetes to investigate self-mastery.

The Joy of Geekdom

Penny: My God! You are grown men. How can you waste your lives with these stupid toys and costumes and comic books?6

Admittedly, some of Sheldon’s obsessions seem both intellectually demanding and utterly trivial. For starters, he’s knowledgeable about subjects that arguably just don’t matter that much. He is an expert on the history of the X-Men, for instance, and has an expansive Klingon vocabulary. He devotes himself to challenging puzzles that resolve no real-world issues. He’s a master of 3D chess and old text adventure games such as Zork and, as we saw in “The Hamburger Postulate,” will painstakingly recreate the Battle of Gettysburg with condiments just to see what would have happened if the North had been reinforced by Sauron’s Orcs and the South by superheroes and Indian gods. He has also clearly spent much time and effort mastering the strategies of popular games such as the MMORPGs World of Warcraft and Age of Conan and the Magic: The Gathering–like card game Mystic Warlords of Ka-’a. Sheldon will attend to problems in popular culture that have no bearing on real-world issues just as quickly as he will attend to problems that do. For example, he carefully considers the questions of how zombies eat and vampires shave in “The Benefactor Factor” and how Superman can clean his costume when it gets dirty in “The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis.”

Similarly, Sheldon is passionate about art, but not the sort of art that is traditionally accorded status among intellectuals. He’s a connoisseur of television, being devoted to Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, Firefly, Star Gate, Star Trek in all of its incarnations, and more (but not Babylon 5!). His love of cinema is so great that he can’t stand the thought of being late to a screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark with twenty-one seconds of unseen footage, and he is willing to lose his friends rather than part with a genuine ring prop from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. His greatest artistic passion is literature and, in particular, comic books. The mere smell of them can send him into rapture, and he collects and dresses up in anything associated with his comic book heroes. Aristotle thought that pleasure is good in itself, but it must be pleasure gained from a worthy activity. Is such frivolity really a worthy activity for a sharp mind?

What makes a mental activity worthy, though? For Aristotle, the mere fact that a mental activity deals with fiction does not m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction: “Unraveling the Mysteries”
• Part One: “It All Began on A Warm Summer’s Evening in Greece”
• Part Two: “Is it Wrong To Say I Love Our Killer Robot?”
• Part Three: “Perhaps You Mean A Different Thing Than I Do When You Say ‘Science’”
• Part Four: “I Need Your Opinion on A Matter of Semiotics”
• Part Five: “The Human Experience That Has Always Eluded Me”
• The Episode Compendium: “Hey, It’s a Big Menu—There’s Two Pages Just for Desserts”
• Contributors: “But If We Were Part of the Team . . . We Could Drink for Free in Any Bar in Any College Town”
• Index: “Cornucopia . . . Let’s Make That Our Word of the Day”