The Good Place

Thanks to the student who yesterday tipped me to check out "The Good Place" (sorry I've forgotten who, & in which section-identify yourself in class Tuesday and you can take your base).

What really amuses me about the show so far, aside from the premise itself, is the assumption that a professor of ethics would necessarily be a good person!

Consider (and recall that School of Life video on eastern vs. western philosophy)...

And then what?
What happens when we ask a philosopher for advice?

ANIL GOMES

In 1791, a young Austrian noblewoman wrote to Immanuel Kant to ask for help. She had loved someone who, in her eyes, encompassed all within himself that was worthwhile. But she had lied to him, and she wanted advice.

I have offended this person, because of a long drawn out lie, which I have now disclosed to him, though there was nothing unfavourable to my character in it, I have no vice in my life that needed hiding. The lie was enough though, and his love vanished. As an honourable man, he doesn’t refuse me friendship. But that inner feeling that once, unbidden, led us to each other, is no more – oh my heart splinters into a thousand pieces! If I hadn’t read so much of your work I would certainly have put an end to my life.

There was no happy ending. Kant’s initial reply was sweet but inept, the kind of thing a philosopher might write when confronted with the messy reality of human relations. (“Well, we must draw a distinction between lying and merely being reticent . . .”) But he failed to reply to her second letter, a letter which movingly set out the extent to which she then saw her life as lacking value, and instead sent it to a friend as a warning “against the wanderings of a sublimated fantasy”. In 1803 Maria von Herbert killed herself... (continues)