Dr. Andrew Wood Office: HGH 210; Phone: (408) 924-5378 Email: wooda@email.sjsu.edu Web: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda

Reading: Barwick, D. (2001). Enjoying the so-called 'iced cream': Mr. Burns, Satan, and Happiness. In W. Irwin, M.T. Conard, and A. Skoble's The Simpsons and philosophy: The d'oh of Homer. Chicago: Open Court.

Note: These comments are not designed to "summarize" the reading. Rather, they are available to highlight key ideas that will emerge in our classroom discussion. As always, it's best to read the original text to gain full value from the course.

Barwick's chapter (pp. 191-201) seeks to shed light on the cause of Mr. Burns' fundamental unhappiness. One might find it difficult to imagine Springfield's wealthiest person as being miserable, but the show works hard to prove that money does not bring happiness for a lonely tyrant. Before disposing of two partial explanations - Burns' excessive lifestyle and his boredom with the mundane pleasures of life - Barwick turns his focus on a central cause, that Burns alienates himself from things of substance, living in a world of abstractions.

Here we confront an odd thesis given that many critics decry our excessive materialism, arguing that we've forsaken abstractions and symbolic thinking. Barwick counters that much of humanity - Americans in particular - have indeed accumulated plenty of material things. However, these things are not rooted in material experience; they link only to abstractions like, well, the accumulation of more things. From this section, Barwick introduces competing concepts of good as being instrumental and good as being intrinsic.

Instrumental good refers to the potential for a thing to be good because of its connection to other good things while intrinsic good refers to things that are good-in-themselves. Burns suffers because all the things he views to be good are merely instrumental, leading to other things without end. Warwick concludes that Burns could find happiness if he would simply recall the simple intrinsic pleasures of things-as-they are, starting perhaps with a nice serving of "the so-called iced cream." The chances of this transformation taking place? Not likely.

[Return]