How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy Read Free Page A

(“Duel Citizenship”).
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    His legs stop working after running the marathon without any training (“Lucky Penny”).
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    He gets a nickname he hates (“Swarley”).
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    His long-awaited two hundredth conquest is an odious muscular body builder and not a super-model as planned (“Right Place, Right Time”).
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    As nobody is willing to give him a high five, he’s forced to hold up his right arm for hours (“I Heart NJ”).
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    He’s left in the doctor’s office for the weekend with his ‘Sensory Deprivator 5000’ on (“Bad News”).
    But the best example of our Schadenfreude towards Barney comes from the various slap bet episodes. Here we have full episodes organized around our desire to see Barney punished. So it’s undeniable that some of our emotional engagement with Barney is of the Schadenfreude nature. The episodes about the mystery woman who tells all Barney’s potential conquests about his shenanigans resulting in the woman slapping him fits this pattern. We just like seeing Barney getting slapped.
    But this isn’t the whole story. What this pattern of Barney doing something bad and then getting punished for it makes even more conspicuous is the recurrence of those situations where Barney does something really bad, but goes completely unpunished.
    A striking example is the ending of the “Playbook” episode, where he tricked all his friends (and especially Lily), used Robin, with whom he just split, maliciously, and got the reward of going out with the girl he wanted to. If he ever deserves to be slapped, this would be the time, but there is no slap, just Barney victoriously winking at us. Schadenfreude is not the only and not even the dominant way in which we engage emotionally with Barney.
    4. Imagining from the Inside
    The main way that philosophers have tried to understand why we identify with or become emotionally engaged with fictional characters (in movies, plays, or novels) is with the idea of “imagining from the inside.” The general idea is that when we identify with a fictional character, we imagine her fromthe inside. We put ourselves, in imagination, in that person’s shoes. So the possibility we need to consider is that we do identify with Barney in the sense that we put ourselves in his shoes. 1
    But why would we want to do that? Why would we want to imagine “the emotional equivalent of a scavenging sewer rat,” to quote Lily, from the inside. Surely there must be more attractive things to imagine . . .
    What does it mean to imagine someone from the inside? What does it mean to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes? Is it imagining being someone else? Is it imagining having someone else’s experiences? The most plausible way of cashing out this metaphor is to say that we imagine ourselves in someone else’s situation—an idea that goes back at least to Adam Smith’s 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments .
    If identification with a fictional character is a matter of imagining this person from the inside and if imagining from the inside amounts to imagining being in this person’s situation, then the proposal is that we imagine being in Barney’s situation when we engage with him emotionally. And here we may have a way out of the Barney Paradox.
    Here is Alfred Hitchcock, who knew a thing or two about triggering the right emotional reaction from the audience:
    Even in this case [where we know that there is a bomb concealed in a briefcase in the plot to assassinate Hitler] I don’t think the public would say, “Oh, good, they’re all going to be blown to bits,” but rather, they’ll be thinking, “Watch out. There’s a bomb!” What it means is