Gregory Bergman - I Watch, Therefore I Am: From Socrates to Sartre, the Great Mysteries of Life as Explained Through Howdy Doody, Marcia Brady, Homer Simpson, Don Draper, and other TV Icons

When will I learn? The answers to lifes problems arent at
the bottom of a bottle, theyre on TV!

Homer Simpson

On a cold day in 1884, the patent office in Berlin received an application for a patent from a young man with the endearingly Germanic name of Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. The device Nipkow wanted to patent was calledinventively enoughthe Nipkow disk. The disk, combined with other gadgetry, allowed Nipkow to transmit a visual image via telegraph wire, from one place to another.

Sadly, Nipkows gadget never caught on because no one could see any use for it. Discouraged, Nipkow stopped inventing things and became a railway engineer. But the moment was historic, even if he didnt know it. The Nipkow disk is the earliest version of television. Beginning in the 1920s, other inventors improved the technology involved, and by the 1930s TV saw the advent of broadcast programs. From there, of course, it was a short step to sitcoms, Westerns, dramas, Ronald Reagan, and then a long, dark slide into American Idol, endless reruns of Law & Order, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Right away television raised all sorts of questions:

• Was it a power for Good or Evil?
• Who should control it?
• Could the government use it to control the minds of its citizens?
• How could investors make money off it?

There was a sort of nebulous feeling, especially among the clergy, that television was sinful, distracting parishioners from their more godly pursuits. Others were increasingly intrigued by its ability to shape public opinion. But everyone involved spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this new technology meant. It was rapidly changing the way everyone viewed the worldVietnam, for example, became historys first televised war. People also started to wonder about how the way we receive information affects the information itself. As Marshall McLuhan said, The medium is the message.

Its a curious thing that about 2,300 years earlier, Greeks lounging around on the shores of Asia Minor and the Greek peninsula were asking similar questions. They called their investigations philosophymeaning the love of wisdom.

The ancient philosophers had relentlessly curious minds. They werent content to accept things as they wereinstead, they believed there was more to the world than met the eye.

For instance, they wanted to know about existence. How do we know things exist? Does something exist just because we think it does? Investigations into this branch of philosophy are called ontology. (We promise we arent going to use a lot of big words like ontology in this book. Really.)

They also wanted to understand knowledgehow do we know things? And how do we know we know them? This type of philosophic investigation is called epistemology. The word ontology comes from the Greek word meaning that which is, while epistemology is from the Greek episteme, meaning knowledge. If someone asks you about that, you can demonstrate how smart you are by spouting out the etymology of these two words.

Finally, they wanted to know how people manage to get along with each other. What convinces us that there are rules we should follow, and what do those rules consist of? They called this inquiry ethics.

The ancient Greeks also had a branch of philosophy that today wed consider to be more the province of sciencethey wanted to know how the world worked. Was it made of one substance? If so, what was it? What was fire, and where did it come from? What was the cause of clouds? And so on. They called this physics or natural philosophy.

Some of these questions may strike you as strange or obvious or even silly. But 2,300 years later, were still asking them. In fact, weve come to realize that the Greeks were really on to something. They may not have had all the answers, but they certainly knew what questions to ask.

This book will tackle some of the most important philosophic questions and schools, using examples from television. Why television? Because today TV is among the biggest sources of information on the planet. More people know who Snooki is than know the name of any great American philosopher. Just consider the following facts:

• There are around one and a half billion television sets in the world.
• The average American watches four hours of television every day.
• In a sixty-five-year life, a normal person will have spent nine years glued to the boob tube.
• The average U.S. household has 2.24 televisions.

Pretty scary, huh?

Television provides a useful reference point too, because its also concerned with existence, knowledge, and ethics. In some ways, Jersey Shore embodies this. If everyone turned off their TV sets, would JWoww, Snooki, and The Situation cease to exist? (God, we hope so!)

Of course, we have to wonder: If TV had been around in ancient Greece, would these guys have invented philosophy? Or would they have spent all their time watching cooking shows about hummus and olives, or game shows like