HIMYM & Philosophy; Hayden Hagan H02

The way that Barney Stinson in the hit show How I Met Your Mother functions is by making everything in his life “awesome.” He categorizes anything from riding a train full of drunk New Yorkers at two in the morning to successfully helping the FBI in a raid on his office as awesome. How is it that one single man can redirect his feelings from things so small and so grand as the same level of “legendary?” Kris Groffin explains this best in the second chapter of this collected essay and goes step by step to explain Barney’s personal philosophy.

First, you have to “discover yourself.” Learn to recognize and have a grasp on the negative emotion that you want to change. From there, you have to avoid self-reflection at all costs. Create the understanding in yourself that having this emotion isn’t going to change what has happened, and you’ll end up “drowning in your emotions.” Once you’ve avoided this almost primal part of your being, you can move on to choose the path of awesomeness.

When you choose the “path of awesomeness,” you begin to say “STOP” to those negative emotions, and you develop the mindset that you are in control of something as involuntary as being upset at something. Making this mindset clear to both yourself and those around you can be done by outward expression. “You have full responsibility to be who you want to be.” Understand that your emotions don’t hold you back, and that you are upgrading yourself. The last step is “being awesome all over the place.” Groffin explains this best by saying that lying about your emotional state is not awesome, but instead it’s a weak sham. Once you’ve stripped yourself of basic negative emotions, you can proceed into being awesome. 

This very real-life thought process has been debated between somaticists and cognitivists for years. On the one hand, somaticists say that your emotions are essentially bodily, but cognitivists argue this with the explanation that emotions are really about the way that you think. In the end, both of these schools of thought support Barney’s mindset.

William James defended somaticists with his theory that emotions are physiological changes. His logic was that emotions are bodily feelings, and that we can control our body to some extent, therefore we can control our emotions to some extent. This can be loosely translated to the “fake it till you make it” saying that we hear a lot. However, contemporary emotion theorists argue that James claim isn’t useful anymore, and that it is naive to reduce your emotions to the body.

If emotions can’t be attributed to the body, then what is it? Jean-Paul Sartre argued that emotions are some sort of judgement. Robert Solomon backed this up with his “judgement theory of emotion.” This theory explains that because emotions are judgments that we make, and judgments are activities that we voluntarily do, then emotions are things we choose to be a part of. James, Sartre, and Solomon could all be correct or incorrect after looking at Jesse Prinz ides about emotion. Prinz states that emotions are an “embodied appraisal,” therefore, it’s a complex episode which includes both body and mind. 

This process is a lengthy one, that includes perception, reaction, judgement, memory, impulse, and expression with both body and mind. Prinz says that emotions are “not entities that sit in our bodies without changing our movements.” They are thing we do as reactions to occurrences in our life. All of this winds up being a great explanation and insight into how Barney Stinson’s mind works, and shows one of the many philosophies laced within the shows.

Quiz questions:

1. What two groups of philosophers have argued how emotions come to be?

2. What philosopher defended the somaticists style of thinking?

3. Who came up the "Judgement Theory of Emotions"?

4. What does Jesse Prinz claim emotions are?

Discussion questions:

1. Do you think emotions are bodily or judgments we make?

2. Do you agree with Barney's philosophy on emotions?

3. Do you think you can ever truly be happy if you just ignore your emotions?