Philosophy and Writing, Specifically Television Writing (guest post by Eric Kaplan)

This is a guest post by Eric Kaplan on television fiction, for a series of blogposts we are hosting on philosophers who write fiction or poetry (see here and here for earlier installments).

Eric Kaplan has a PhD. in philosophy from UC Berkeley and has written for Futurama, Flight of the Conchords, and The Big Bang Theory among other shows. His book "Does Santa Exist: A Philosophical Investigation" was published by Dutton. 

When I first made the switch, from being enrolled in the UC Berkeley PhD. program where I had just finished my oral exam with Donald Davidson, John Searle, and Hubert Dreyfus about “being true to the facts”, to working as a staff writer for David Letterman, I felt guilty. It felt like I was abandoning a holy calling for something tawdry. If I was writing jokes for the top 10, who would learn and spread the good news about what it meant, or didn’t mean, to be true to the facts?

I’ve since realized that this was an error. Now I have reached the correct view, which is that writing and philosophy are both integrative practices. In philosophy we bring together parts of ourselves (possibly self- or family of origin- generated, possibly inherited from the tradition), and get them talking.

How can truth be what works, but also what is true whether or not it works? How can the good be what is good for us, but also what we ought to do even if it’s bad for us? If we’re some sort of neo-Platonist (and I think I might be, a few days of the week at any rate) we think that unifying these opposing opinions is bringing pieces of life back to a whole. Each philosophical position we are trying to reconcile is a fragment of that whole, wandering orphaned in the world (or in our our minds) seeking union.

Telling a story does that too, but sometimes it can do things a philosophical essay can’t. I can write a philosophical essay about the role of risk and emotion and passion in a well-lived life, but the tone of the essay already takes a stand on that issue. The essay is judicious. It doesn’t take that many risks with the audience. A television show about a woman who loses her family because of her love of gambling will not just talk about risk in a risk-free way, or talk about emotions in a non-emotional way. It will make you feel emotions. It will run a risk.

I think stories can reach places essays don't because the only duty of the story is to hold our interest. A story does not have to be consistent. It does not have to be true. It does not have to make sense. It does not have to be responsible. I can tell a story “Bob was a unicorn. He was not a unicorn. He was not named Bob.” A story can reach out and challenge itself “Sally was a woman with the following odd quirk: everything you think about her from reading this story was false.” At least two, or maybe three members of my oral committee would say: so much the worse for stories. They are nonsense. But, in the spirit of unifying those orphan fragments, I feel a need, or a yen, or perhaps a calling, to unify sense and nonsense. Whether that need itself makes any sense, I couldn’t tell you -- at least not in an essay. Maybe I could in a story. The Yoga Vasistha is awfully good!

Finally, the sort of television writing I do is of the particular sub-genus of writing that aims to be popular. That means it must be something millions of people will “get”. Care about. If it’s a comedy, find funny. It’s customary in certain groups to sneer at popular writing and the obvious compromises it requires. I don’t want to sneer at the sneering. Staying loyal to what you think is good -- even if nobody else agrees -- is a good thing. But I also feel a hankering to unify this split between the elite and the popular. I think it is a bit like being an engineer. If you are building a bridge that only a few very skilled hikers will ever cross, you can make it out of a slender web of rope. If you expect thousands to drive across it, it had better be well-designed steel.

Both bridges -- the diaphanous rope bridge (in this analogy, if you have drifted off: elite philosophy) and the steel suspension bridge (popular writing) have their virtues. If people on either side of the bridge feel ambivalent about those on the other side -- what Kierkegaard would call an “antipathetic sympathy” -- that fact itself is also worth feeling and thinking about. I think!

Comments

[Martin Shuster]

Thanks, Eric! -- Could you say more about how you (practically) moved from philosophy into television?

[Eric Kaplan]

Practically I put my dissertation on ice for a year and spent it writing writing samples and sending them out to shows.

[Ken Albert]

Thanks for this post! I just have to ask...about Big Bang Theory...are you behind (1) the reference to Frege's argument against psychologism and(2) the modal logical version of the ontological argument on a marker board in the background of one scene?

[Eric Kaplan]

Frege: Yes. Modal logic: No.