(chill instrumental music)
- What's up Wisecrack, Michael here
to once again, try to prove to myself and my mom
that I, in fact, did not waste my twenties
by studying the work of dead philosophers
while all my friends achieved financial stability
and bought homes for their burgeoning families.
(sighing)
So for this round, we wanted to revisit a Wisecrack staple
and something you all have asked us to cover,
season four of Rick and Morty.
Now the show deals
with an abundance of philosophical themes,
but I want to focus on one
that's both very present in season four
and one of my favorites,
death.
(driving distorted music)
So let's all channel our inner goths
and get into this philosophy reacts
to Rick and Morty season four. As always, spoilers ahead.
Now, before we get into it
I want to take a second to talk about Wisecracks Patreon
and how it can help keep you clear
of the type of all-encompassing existential despair
we'll be talking about in today's video,
because existence can be a rough hang,
and sometimes it's the little things
that help keep us going.
Wisecrack patrons get awesome perks,
like early access to ad free versions of all of our videos,
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And memberships start at just $2,
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Best of all, the community you'll find
on the Wisecrack Patreon
will keep you from complete existential dread
as you ponder the possibility
of being alone in the universe.
And if that doesn't work,
you can at least keep yourself distracted
by all the extra content.
So go to patreon.com/wisecrack today to check it out.
Now, back to the show.
And now let's take a look at the first episode
in which Morty gets his hands on some death crystals
that allow him to see how and when he's going to die,
based on what decisions he makes.
Obviously, this is going to end well.
Let's check out the clip.
- Do they kill you?
- You're thinking of bullets, Morty,
death crystals show you how you're gonna die.
(anguished pain and crying)
- Jesus Christ! I die a million times?
- Your future stems from your present
which if you're living right, keeps changing.
- Ooh, okay.
Now I really liked this death crystal stuff
as it gives me an excuse to talk
about one of my favorite philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard.
For one thing, dude was obsessed with death
and this obsession worked its way into his philosophy.
One of his books is called The Sickness Unto Death
which rather than being a study on 19th century pandemics,
was about a disease
he thinks we're all infected with from birth, despair.
And sadly there's no vaccine for this one.
For Kierkegaard, despair makes us all
walking balls of tension,
caught between all the freedom and wonder
that our big brains are capable of
and the cold necessity that we still have to eat
and sleep and one day die.
Because of this, we exist in the present moment
while also being aware of all of our future possibilities.
And Morty's crystals make all of this literal.
He is seduced by the possibilities of the future
while disregarding what his actions mean in the present.
And that's even
after his grandpa tries to hit him with some wisdom.
- Truth is, anyone that knows how they're definitely
going to die as either boring as hell or about to get shot.
Duck! (gunshots and shattering)
- Okay, for Kierkegaard, this is actually just true.
What Rick said, anyone who knows how they're going to die
loses what makes us human, which is our freedom.
Okay, now Kierkegaard probably wasn't considering
death crystals when he argued that.
But to embrace our humanity, we have to accept
both all the awesome unknown possibilities, including
that your hot high school crush will one day sob
over your dying body and the depressing reality
that we're all going to die one way or another.
Rick on the other hand, and this is weird, exhibits
a relatively healthy understanding of our relation to death.
He warns Morty against being obsessed with its inevitability
because he recognizes that the self is a balancing act
between a healthy acceptance of our mortality
and the freedom to keep living our lives.
Okay, we're gonna keep going.
- You just use these to win fights?
- I don't use them.
People that spend their life avoiding death
are already dead.
They're also rich.
And I like to spend my life with their money.
- Oh my God, Jessica. - Morty
- Oh, I love that.
"People that spend their life avoiding death
are already dead."
Okay. So along with being a great senior yearbook quote,
Rick's advice here really vibes
with Kierkegaard's discussion of despair.
Because in trying to avoid death
you end up sacrificing your freedom
which leads to a (beep) ton of despair.
And in other words, when you try to avoid death
you're really avoiding living your life.
And by being obsessed with how his life is going to end,
Morty is going to miss out on everything
that's potentially good about his present
- You're going to be a lot happier if you focus
on the moment rather than on how you're going to die.
I mean, who's worried about that?
- Rick, once again is spot on.
When you can't live life in the moment
your life is going to be miserable.
For Kierkegaard, this idea of the moment
is crucial to how we understand our existence.
Because when we focus on living in the moment
we're not worrying about a future we can't control,
or getting depressed thinking about a past
that we can't redo.
Obviously at this point in the episode Morty
still hasn't learned anything.
Even though for once Rick is giving advice
that isn't just cold cosmic nihilism.
So we're going to jump ahead to the end
after all the death and destruction to see what
happens when our guys are safely back in the garage.
Let's see what they've learned.
- Hey. Sorry. I didn't listen to you
and tried to kill the whole world and stuff.
I guess I got to learn how to live in the moment
a little more.
- Oh boy, so you actually learned something today?
What is this Full House?
I was living in the moment all day
and it kept getting me killed Nazis.
I think you have to think ahead and live in the moment.
- Once again. He's right.
He's telling Morty to think about his life, both in terms
of what's going on now and what the future might hold.
Now to Kierkegaard the death crystals
probably would seem to enable one of our worst tendencies:
to obsess over all of the futures possibilities
rather than narrowing them down
and deciding to actually do one thing.
Put differently,
if you're obsessed with a non-existent future Jessica,
you might miss out on the real Jessica
right in front of you.
- A bunch of us girls were going to go skinny dipping later
If you wanted to join?
- No thanks.
I'm assuming we maybe get together
in our forties?
- If despair is an obsession with infinite possibility
the way to get over this is to narrow it
down to one possibility and then actualize it in the moment.
I.e. maybe don't turn down an opportunity
to go out with your crush,
just because a death crystal tells you to avoid it,
so you'll die next to her 70 years from now.
So it's great that Morty realized this not so great
that he realized this
after basically becoming a domestic terrorist.
Now the exploration of death keeps going
into episode two of this season.
Where a meeting between Rick
and in invading pooper on his toilet planet,
forces them both to think
about what the point of our existence really is.
Okay. Let's start on Rick's poop planet,
right after he suspects
someone else is using his secret toilet.
- Reverse digestion extrapolation.
Time to meet your maker.
- Oh boy. No Rick gets at something super important here.
Every philosopher ever has (beep) likely multiple times.
So is there at least something vaguely philosophical
about the necessity of defecation?
All right.
No, no. That's, that's not very philosophical at all.
So let's catch up with Rick,
after he then goes and tracks down his phantom pooper.
- You, you dropped that.
- I'll have to call you back.
- Where do you want to die?
- My life has been hollow since I lost her.
Using your toilet was nice though.
I'm a bit of a shy pooper. - So sad
- I'm ready when you are.
- Wow, and shouts to any shy poopers
currently watching this,
we see you and we respect you.
So Tony, who is our toilet thief.
He thinks he's about to die.
And I don't know about you
but if that were me, I'd be really freaked out.
I don't want to die yet.
But as a lot of philosophers have pointed out,
going all the way back to Socrates.
It's kind of stupid to be afraid of death,
because why would we be afraid
of something we've never experienced, right?
Like you wouldn't say that something tasted gross
before we had a chance to eat it.
So why would you be scared of death when you haven't died?
Now, a more appropriate response to death,
and maybe the one that Tony is really going through here
is anxiety.
This happens to be a mood explored by our dude Kierkegaard
and later by German philosopher, Martin Heidegger
who was very much not our buddy.
And you can Google him to find out why.
But Heidegger thought that the real task of philosophy
was to think about what it means
that our lives are one way journeys towards the grave.
Now Heidegger called this being-towards-death.
And this being-towards-death seems to be what
Tony starts experiencing here as he assumes
that Rick is about to kill him.
Now, Heidegger thought that when we face the fact
of our deaths, we get anxious and this anxiety differs
from fear because we fear something determinant.
Like Rick's fear of letting Tony in as an actual friend.
Now anxiety, on the other hand, doesn't have a fixed object.
It's like a full on existential mood.
Like existence is pain in Meseeks parlance.
Now for Heidegger in anxiety,
we come like face-to-face with our true selves.
And we block out all the day to day (beep)
that distracts us from really thinking about our existence.
So anxiety turns out to be kind of a good thing,
and for Tony, it seems that his anxiety has shown him
that his authentic existence has a lot to do
with pooping and privacy and being proud of it.
- You know what shy pooping is Rick?
It's a pointless bid for control.
You want to take the one part
of life that you truly think is yours,
and you want to protect it
from a universe that takes whatever it wants.
It took my wife.
It clearly took something from you.
We can spend our lives fighting
that, or we can choose to be free.
- I'm not kidding. That's legitimately beautiful.
When Tony right there says that we can choose to be free,
he's no longer just talking about pooping.
He's getting at the relationship between how we think
about death and our own freedom.
And this is something that was crucial for Heidegger
who thought freedom only really comes through
acknowledging our mortality.
Now Tony seems to take this to heart.
And from this, he seems to get over his death anxiety
so that he can truly live.
At least until, let's keep going and we'll see.
- Tony died.
- Excuse me?
- He quit his job, started living life to the fullest.
He crashed into a tree
space skiing down Mount Space Everest.
- (beep) Mount Space Everest? - Mount Space Everest.
- Okay, Jesus, I gotta process this.
- Okay, RIP Tony, obviously,
but it sounds cliche to say
that everybody dies, but not everyone truly lives
but like other famous cliches,
a broken clock is still right twice a day.
A dog in the hat is better than a fish in the toe.
You know, the road to take
if you know the path to make.
Two beers before breakfast you'll ace that math test.
There's truth to it.
Now for Heidegger, we can only live an authentic life
if we confront the reality of death
and find meaning in our lives, in spite of it.
It's that anxiety thing we already talked about,
and Tony seems to have embraced his life
and spent it doing things that held meaning for him,
like base skiing at Mount Space Everest,
without a fear of death holding him back.
And I'm sure that's what Rick is going to take away
from this whole experience.
So let's go see what lessons he's learned.
- There he is.
There's our guy congrats, Tony!
Enjoy using it all by yourself while you sit there
and think about how nobody wants to be around you
and how you ruined it for yourself.
Because you're looking at you're a human piece of (beep).
Look at you sitting there,
King (beep) on his throne of loneliness,
The saddest piece of garbage in the entire cosmos.
- Well, that's, that's legit very sad.
It seems like Rick didn't really learn much here
or at least didn't get inspired
by Tony to start living his life.
Though in fairness,
many of my favorite philosophers are
miserable pieces of (beep) so,
maybe Rick is ultimately living
too philosophically or something.
Or maybe I'm just idealizing
toxic Intellectual father figures
to deal with my own issues.
Yeah, let's, let's wrap this up now.
Now to paraphrase the great fictional novelist, Eli Cash,
we all know that death is the worst part of human existence.
but what this video presupposes is, maybe it isn't?
While we might think of death as a limiting factor
to our experience, philosophers and shy poopers alike
have considered how our finite lifespans
are what give our lives meaning in the first place
and season four of Rick and Morty really makes us think
about how pondering death can actually enrich our existence.
Because let's be real,
we're all gonna die, hopefully painlessly and in our sleep.
But at least one of you is going to choke
to death in a burger King parking lot.
After you try to swallow a chicken fry whole.
You know who you are and I'm sorry
but that's why you put sauce on the chicken fry
to lubricate it as it goes into your throat.
But for the rest of us,
death can be something that makes us take advantage
of the time that we do have
to do as much cool (beep) possible or,
you know, poop and stuff. But what do you guys think?
Can Rick and Morty help us reflect
on the surprising joys of our finite existence?
Or are we just overthinking the scariest part of life?
Let us know you think in the comments
and definitely let us know
if there's something else you want to see me
try my best to do a philosophy on.
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Thanks for watching guys. Later.
(upbeat electronic band music)