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Hellloooo!! ladida. Seinfeld and Philosophy is part of a series of books looking into famous movies and TV shows and inspecting them with a philosophical or psychological mindset. I found this project to be fantastic, if not necessary. When watching TV, we should not only be trying to take a break or chill, not that there’s anything wrong with that!, but we should be studying what we are watching, allowing it to help us understand humanity or other things better. When we are doing these secular things, we can elevate them and a make them worthwhile in this fashion. I have found this blog very productive for myself, for this exact reason. As Socrates said, “an unexamined life is not worth living”. If we fail to this we allow our minds to fall to shrinkage.
Socrates’ statement is especially relevant to Seinfeld. Much of the show is Jerry and his friends hanging out talking about the minutia of every little detail of their every day lives. However, it seems unlikely that this type of examination is what Socrates was talking about . We should all be examining our lives with the intent of making us into better people. Jerry seems to be losing the forest by consistently only looking at the trees never getting past the details of non-important events. The conversations are a goal to themselves rarely leading to greater understanding, yada yada yada. Many times it is very hard not to fall into the trap that the Seinfeld characters fall into, but it is something that we should all be aware of.
Before I even heard of this book, I always thought of Seinfeld in a discourse in existentialism. The word IS absurd. Seinfeld tries to show how all the little things we do when we go to the dry cleaners or a dinner party are part of the “theatre of the absurd”, having no real meaning. And just being societal constructs we have created. This comes to a crescendo in the final episode. The entire episode recaps just how absurd their lives are, and really all of our lives, as we relate to the “New York four”. At the end (Spoiler alert! Can you really have a spoiler alert for a show that came out a decade ago?) Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer are stuck in a cell together for a year. It is reminiscent of the same thing they would be doing outside the jail, in Monk’s coffee shop. Jerry asks George a question about the top button of his shirt and the show ends with George wondering if they had had this conversation before. In fact they have, the opening scene of the pilot episode begins with it. So our characters have spent nine years and they have come back to were they started. The show about nothing ends with nothing changing, because everything is absurd. While, Seinfeld and Philosophy does not talk about this point, it does mention how Kramer is stuck at Kierkegaard's Aesthetic stage of existence, the lowest level of human reality. I think this approach to Seinfeld is sound and I am forced to stuff my sorrys in a sack that the author did not invoke it.
While the idea for the book was certainly interesting, and deserves a pop in for the big Seinfeld fan, it was many times repetitive and rarely informative. While I certainly believe that we should be looking at Seinfeld through this lens, for the casual reader I would say No Book for you! I have read some of both Psychology and the Simpsons and The Matrix and Philosophy, and both were much more enlightening. Giddy Up!
