How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (15 page)

Lucky Penny

In the Season Two episode “Lucky Penny,” Ted and Robin are debating why they're late for a plane to Chicago, where Ted has a job interview. In typical Hegelian fashion the cause of their
tardiness depends on where they begin the story. By reflecting back, they string a set of seemingly random events into a coherent story that explains how they miss the flight.

In the first version of the story, the blame lies with Barney, who after running the New York City Marathon finds himself unable to get off the subway. Ted, attempting to come to his aid, jumps a turnstile, is issued a citation, and must attend court, making him late for his flight. Here, two completely isolated events, Barney running the marathon and Ted being late to his flight, can be united through an act of reflection that ascribes a necessary relationship to the two.

However, Ted and Robin aren't finished with their philosophical reflections yet. Ted pushes the starting point back even further, attempting to find the cause of Barney running the marathon. Ted states that Barney only ran the marathon because of a bet with Marshall, who was unable to run because of a broken foot. Marshall only broke his foot because, while addressing his t-shirt chaffing with petroleum jelly, Robin startled him. He then slipped and broke his foot, and was thus unable to run the next day. When starting the narrative here, Ted is able to lay the blame on Robin.

Yet their reflections still remain incomplete, as Robin argues that she was only in Ted and Marshall's apartment because she needed to take a nap, having spent all night with Lily camping out for a bridal sale. Pushing back even further, they discover that this only occurred because Ted and Robin discovered the sale while eating hot dogs from a street vendor. Even further back, Ted realizes that they were only eating hot dogs because he had found an old penny. Promising Robin that it was a valuable collector's piece, he pledges to buy her dinner with the money he receives from it. As it was worth one dollar and fifty cents, they can only purchase hot dogs for dinner. From this penny a chain of events is set off leading to Ted and Robin missing their flight.

Thus, through an act of reflection, Ted is able to apply a necessary, albeit belated, relationship from two disparate events: him finding a penny on the subway and him missing a flight to Chicago. The historical progression also depends on where the story is started, which always is arbitrarily imposed, but is nonetheless a significant determinant to the unfolding of the sotry. As Robin points out, “I don't think we can go back any
further than that unless you know who dropped the penny,” implying that the story could potentially change even more. Thus the progression of history itself always mirrors the logic employed to connect its various events. Furthermore, while the Ted of the present is able to connect this lucky penny to missing his flight, “Future-Ted” is able to connect the lucky penny to the final end of the narrative, his marriage. “Future-Ted” knows that Ted missing this interview kept him from relocating to Chicago, which would have prevented him from meeting his wife. Eventually, at the end of history's progression, Ted is able to connect a single penny left on the ground to him marrying his wife. This narrative could never be known in advance; only through the idea of belated necessity can one connect something as miniscule as a penny to finding “the One.”

Right Place, Right Time

In the episode, “Right Place, Right Time,” Ted accomplishes another feat of reflective logic, explaining how a number of haphazard events led to him being on the same street corner as Stella, the woman who left him at the altar. Looking back, Ted realizes that he was only on that street corner because of a number of unrelated decisions made on a walk that day, and that without running into Stella and her fiancé Tony, Ted never would have met his wife.

Again the narrative starts with a trivial event: Ted lacks architectural inspiration, and Robin tells him to go for a walk. Ted decides to grab a bagel, but remembers that Robin got food poisoning from his favorite bagel shop. He therefore turns left out of his apartment and goes to his second favorite bagel place. On the way, he stops to purchase a copy of the magazine
Muscle Sexxy
to see Barney's two-hundredth sexual conquest, who was featured in the magazine. Next, he stops to give a homeless man a dollar.

In another flashback, we learn that Marshall, having discovered the GNB graphics department, developed an endearing, yet annoying, fascination with charts. In retribution, Ted threw all of his charts out of the window, only to learn that some were for an important presentation at GNB. When Ted goes to retrieve them, he finds them in the possession of Milt the homeless man, and Ted agrees to pay him one dollar a day
for one million days in exchange for the charts. Ted then arrives at a street corner only to be tapped on the shoulder by his ex-fiancé.

In this episode Ted not only shows that historical narratives depend on where they are chosen to begin, but also how his own life was affected by the apparently unrelated actions of his friends. Without Barney trying to meet a challenge of sleeping with two hundred women and Marshall's fascination with charts, Ted would not have been at that street corner at that particular moment. As we learn in the next episode, Tony was concerned with Ted's emotional well-being after their meeting and offers him a job as a university professor. As we'll see in the next section, this event plays a critical role in Ted's life. Only upon reflection, Ted sees how Barney's love-life and Marshall's professional life are necessary to him meeting his future wife.

In addition to telling his children how he met their mother, he attempts to give them a lesson on Hegel's philosophy of history in this episode. He tells them:

The great moments of your life won't necessarily be the things you do, they'll also be the things that happen to you. Now, I'm not saying you can't take action to affect the outcome of your life, you have to take action, and you will. But never forget that on any day, you can step out the front door and your whole life can change forever. You see, the universe has a plan kids, and that plan is always in motion. A butterfly flaps its wings, and it starts to rain. It's a scary thought but it's also kind of wonderful. All these little parts of the machine constantly working, making sure that you end up exactly where you're supposed to be, exactly when you're supposed to be there. The right place at the right time.

Thus only “Future Ted” can see how these apparently unrelated events play necessary roles in him finding his wife. While Ted appreciates the majesty of the universe unfolding towards a final purpose, he also maintains the space for the human freedom. It is the unique combination of Ted's own decisions and actions and the events that happen to him that move him closer and closer to meeting his wife. Though he can see how these fit together at the end of this process, he is completely on his own while in the midst of them. The universe's plan is always created belatedly; until “Future Ted” can reflect back
upon history the stages of this plan appear to be unrelated contingent events.

The Leap

In “The Leap,” the finale of Season Four, Ted wrestles with whether or not he should take Tony's offer to become a professor of architecture or whether he should continue working as an independent architect. While designing a building for a rib restaurant, Ted wrestles with, and loses to, a goat that Lily has taken home from school. Later, Ted learns that the restaurant has decided to go with the design offered by the Swedish architectural group “Sven.”

Lily attempts to cheer Ted up by telling him to just give in and let the universe make his next move. Again, Lily seems to misunderstand the Hegelian lesson of history. The universe's decisions only become apparent through an act of reflection; the universe can't act for us, as it's through our actions that history progresses. Ted and Marshall take the correct Hegelian approach, however, and both of them decide to act, even if these actions are conditioned by the unfolding of the universe, and neither can know the outcome of their actions. Marshall decides to literally take “the leap” and jump from the roof of Ted's apartment to the neighboring roof. Ted accepts Tony's job offer, and becomes a university professor.

At the end of the episode, “Future Ted” tells his children:

That was the year I was left at the altar, it was the year I got knocked out by a crazy bartender, the year I got fired, the year I got beat up by a goat, a girl goat at that, and damn it if it wasn't one of the best years of my life. Because if any one of those things hadn't happen, I never would have ended up with the best job I ever had, but more importantly, I wouldn't have met your mother, because as you know, she was in that class.

Again, only “Future-Ted” knows how these events conspired to bring Ted to his wife. While in the present, Ted understood them as simply minor, accidental events. However, here “Future Ted” nuances the familiar Hegelian lesson. Here, it's not simply that the necessary relationships that guide history to its final end can only be discovered at the culmination of the process. Instead, Ted shows how the final end of history,
him meeting his wife, redeems all of the terrible events of his life.

Meeting his true love did not merely make getting left at the altar, getting beat up by a bartender, getting beat up by a goat, and failing as an architect worth it in the end. Indeed, each one of these events, despite seeming dreadful at the time, played necessary roles in the unfolding story of how he met his wife. As he states, without any one of these events, he never would have met her, and his children would not be subjected to his now eight-year-long story. Just as for Hegel all of the violence and deaths throughout history are redeemed by contributing to the development of free political and social institutions, all of the negative events of Ted's life are finally understood as playing critical roles in a history that brings him overwhelming happiness.

A Love Story, Told by Hegel

Ted Mosby didn't become a professional philosopher after college, but he has mastered at least two arts of the trade. First, even though his first and only lecture has lasted for eight years, he still attracts many auditors for his weekly evening sessions. Second, and more importantly, he has found a novel way to teach Hegel's philosophy of history. He has limited Hegel's scope both temporally and geographical from world history to the history to his own adult life in New York. He has also shifted the purpose of history from the development of human freedom to him meeting the love of his life. Yet the key tenet of Hegel's philosophy remains the same: history has a rational purpose, but this purpose must be imposed through an act of reflection. This act establishes necessary relationships between seemingly unrelated events, placing them in service of a final end.

For both Hegel and Ted an interesting relationship between necessity and contingency emerges, that of the “necessity of contingency.” History is made up of contingent, random events, yet they become necessary through reflection at the culmination of them. The universe, despite Lily's protests to the contrary, does not impose a pre-established harmony between all happenings. Instead, only Ted can impose this belated necessity on his life, showing how these contingent events necessarily made him the man he became, and led him to his wife.

Hegel symbolized this idea with the “owl of Minerva.” The goddess of wisdom's pet owl only flies at dusk, just as a philosophical understanding of the necessity of history always comes belatedly. While the flight of the cockamouse that lived in Ted's apartment may not provide as majestic an image as Hegel's owl,
How I Met Your Mother
serves as an excellent introduction to Hegel's philosophy of history.

¹
G.W.F. Hegel,
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
, Volume 1 (Clarendon, 2011), p. 144.

²
The Science of Logic
(Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 23.

³
Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism
(Continuum, 2011), p. 132.

8

Smoking Subs and Eating Joints

M
IGUEL
Á
NGEL
S
EBASTIÁN AND
M
ANOLO
M
ARTÎNEZ

K
ids, we've seen many times how Ted, Marshall, and Lily, while in college, would eat from a two feet long sub that they would pass from one to another. But wait a minute, passing a sub around? Look at their faces and their laughs; this is not a sub, it's a joint. Or is it? Well, it depends on who you ask.