How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (31 page)

How I Met Myself

For a long time not only famous philosophers like René Descartes (1596–1650), but also less philosophically trained people assumed that human identity is hidden within the depths of ourselves, as sort of a pre-given fact. Everybody was assumed to have a ‘core self' that could probably even exist without their body, according to religion.

When modernity kicked in, due to the scientific revolution, the marble towers of religion showed their first cracks and some thinkers started to doubt the traditional view of human identity too. The assumption of a fixed essence of the ‘self' was questioned. Thinkers began to see human identity not as fixed but as something always under construction.

Telling Stories

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) represents this new view of human identity. Ricoeur sees identity as constructed by narratives. He distinguishes three aspects of human identity: spatial continuity, temporal continuity, and a reflective dimension. Spatial continuity refers to the fact that all of our body parts and our mind form a whole together. The temporal continuity of identity lies in the fact that our minds and bodies persist through time. The reflective aspect of identity consists in our perception of our own identity. We are aware of the fact that we exist and we constantly form an idea of who we are.

According to Ricoeur, storytelling is a very important part, or even precondition of, reflectivity, because in this self-presentation we both express and recognize ourselves. Without expressing ourselves in a narrative, we have no real understanding of who we are. In his view the act of storytelling is a medium enabling us to know who we are, while without it we have no immediate access to our ‘self'.

Although Ricoeur mainly focusses on classic narratives like books, other media also tell stories. A play, movie, game, or television series also narrate in its own way. The characters in
How I Met Your Mother
are portrayed as highly narrative beings. The whole series revolves around the stories they tell about themselves and their friends, presenting and constructing their identity in this process.

In our daily lives, we also tell stories. We seek to present ourselves and understand ourselves using different media such as the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, the house we live in, or the videos and photos we make. In
How I Met Your Mother
, Ted and his friends are keenly aware of this, as they carefully hide taped evidence of teenage mistakes (“Slap Bet,” “Sandcastles in the Sand,” “Glitter”), construct outrageous audiovisual resumes (“The Possimpible”) or try to shut ‘that bitch' one of them is dating out of the photos of important group events (“Say Cheese”). This attempt at hiding or presenting aspects of the self is an ongoing process, since our expressions alter in time, just like we do. It's like reading the same book over and over from a different perspective. Even Ted asks himself about his altering conception of James Joyce's
Ulysses
: “Has the book changed, or have I?” It proves that talking to your friends at a bar or in an apartment is very important, for this is how you meet yourself (again and again).

Damn You, Past Self

Not really feeling like having an argument, Ted and Marshall settle the question of who will get their apartment when they part their ways by stating that “future Ted and Marshall” will be very capable of dealing with this matter (“The Duel”). When a real conflict occurs and they have to decide what will happen with the apartment, nothing has yet been settled. Ted curses himself for this, or to be precise he curses a
past
version of himself, exclaiming “damn you, past Ted!”

Another philosopher who tries to break with pre-modern beliefs on human identity is Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). One of his most important theoretical findings is his emphasis on our being as existing in time. While it's true that all beings on this Earth exist in time, Heidegger points out that besides existing in time, the being of humans itself has a fundamentally temporal character. This means that, in comparison with plants or animals, we do not only exist in the ‘now', we are also living in the past because of our memories and are always aimed at our future as well. Everyone has baggage, as is literally shown in
How I Met Your Mother
when Ted's dates are carrying around luggage labeled with their past inadequacies. Hopes and dreams are also a part of this, as Ted
himself shows by buying a house for his nonexistent family (“Home Wreckers”).

The time we find ourselves in goes by in a linear fashion. The arrow of time points in one direction only. Because of this, Ricoeur follows Heidegger's notion of the temporal character of human beings, but distinguishes between a cosmological and phenomenological experience of time. The cosmological time is the one with the arrow, which we experience as linear: the passing by of minutes, weeks, or years. This time is measurable and irreversible and can be seen as objective. Our experience of phenomenological time by contrast—time as we actually experience it—is typified by fragmentation and non-linearity. Experiences are met differently by every individual human being.

Because of these two experiences of time, we not only experience our being as something happening in the now (the cosmological time), but also as something that has happened and has to yet happen. Our phenomenological experience of time can affect the way we act in the present, because we take past accomplishments and actions into account to determine who we are and what we do. Future possibilities may also influence decisions we make in the present.

Sometimes the tension between the cosmological ‘arrow of time' and our phenomenological experience of time causes collisions of different ‘selves'. Some may be quite innocent, like Marshall cursing his thirteen-year-old self for picking up smoking. While Robin, at one point, states that “You can't kick a story in the nuts” (“Natural History”), we see present Marshall in a fantasy walking back to the moment where he picked up his first cigarette to do exactly this to his past self. This is the kind of fantasy we might all have had when thinking about our past mistakes.

Sometimes collisions between selves are more severe. Marshall and Lily seem to be the perfect couple and they feel the same about this most of the time. At one point ‘past Lily' has big plans for making it in the arts and is really getting in the way of ‘present Lily', who is a kindergarten teacher and about to settle down. The conflict between the two Lilys, Lily's two selves, even results in her leaving Marshall to take an art fellowship in San Francisco and pursue old dreams, though present Lily is quite happy in her relationship with Marshall (“Come On”).

In Robin's case, it's not her past selves that hold back her relationship with Ted, but her possible future selves. She could become a famous news anchor, or move to Argentina or Japan. Because of these possibilities she feels she can't be in a relationship as her present self. It's future Ted who tells present Ted that breaking up is for the best, because his future self wants to have kids and Robin doesn't (“Something Blue”).

Telling a story about yourself and constructing your identity can be seen as an ongoing conversation and debate between different selves. Because we and our relationships with others change with the passing of time, our views change with us, altering the story we tell about ourselves. While still young, and without a wife or kids, Ted looks ahead to the time when he will become a dad and sarcastically jokes: “Yeah, I'm really going to sit my kids down one day and tell them about the time uncle Barney scored seven chicks in a row.” As it turns out this is exactly what he does, and future Ted can't help but turn to his kids and wonder: “Am I a bad dad?” (“The Perfect Week”). While these kinds of conversations with yourself usually take place in your head, Ted finds a way to have a very literal conversation between past and present selves. After a bad break up, Ted writes to his future self, telling him to not make the mistake of trying to get back together. His past self presents his future self all the reasons not to (“Twin Beds”), afraid his present mind might be blurred in a moment of nostalgia.

I Had the Story Wrong

Because living is quite a chaotic affair and our experience of our time on Earth shares this quality, Ricoeur sees storytelling as an important way of bringing some unity to this disorder. Thinking about a classic narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, we have to agree that this structure organizes experiences in quite a neat manner. Being introduced to such orderly stories can teach us to deal with our experiences of the world and ourselves. They help to give us a coherent sense of self, an identity that is seemingly continuous in time.

When understanding a television show as a mirror of our contemporary state of mind we have to wonder what has become of us. The classic narrative structure is barely found in modern books, movies, or TV shows. Puzzle-plots with mingled
layers of time, lack of causality, and unclear boundaries between real life and fantsy are in fashion. Storytelling has shifted from representing cosmological time to representing phenomenological time, the way we as human beings actually experience the time we spend on our planet.

How I Met Your Mother
doesn't try to imitate real life, which is inextricably connected to linear time. Instead it tries to represent the human experience—that of Ted and his friends—of phenomenological time. This means a mix of the past, present, and future, where real life and fiction sometimes happen to intertwine and memories get mixed up. So, a goat makes an appearance in Ted's story about his thirtieth birthday (“The Goat”), while by the end of this anecdote it turns out the animal has nothing to do with this particular occasion. In
How I Met Your Mother
, the past, present and future co-exist and time moves in loops rather than in one direction.

Why are today's TV shows, movies, and novels increasingly marked by fragmented and flexible experiences of time? By looking at the society in which these cultural expressions are formed we might find an answer. Our Western culture is increasingly dominated by technologies and new media. This alters our experience of our world and ourselves. Nowadays we experience the world through different channels: smartphones, televisions, laptops, radios, iPods, and social media invade and widen our spaces of experience.

The notion of a fragmented self already existed in literature before the occurrence of these new media. We always have had multiple identities. We are someone's child, as well as an employer or employee, brother or sister or father or mother simultaneously. According to sociologist Sherry Turkle, normally only one identity manifests itself at a time, while new media offer a way of showing them all at once in a parallel manner. Multiple windows of the self can be opened at the same time, according to Turkle. She sees new media as a concretization of and appliance for cultural trends that encourage us to think about identity in terms of flexibility and multiplicity. It doesn't seem that strange that our attempts of representing our fragmented and flexible experiences of ourselves and the world in a cultural fashion have become rather complex as well.

New media not only split our experience of the world into fragments, but bring about a fragmented presentation of ourselves
as well, since we can tell different stories in many ways and even at the same time. We can experiment with different identities online, as Ted demonstrates by having a female avatar in the online game
World of Warcraft
(“How I Met Everyone Else”). While this provides us with a virtual playground for identity experimentation, media don't easily forget. We're haunted by past expressions of the self that swing around in cyberspace, like Marshall's ‘Beercules' video (“The Naked Truth”).

Due to new media and globalization our life story is not preordained anymore. In the old days, being born the son of a farmer, you would most likely become a farmer too. It was not strange to live in the same village all your life, or to practice only one job your whole life long. Our present culture offers more room for mobility and flexibility in the development of our life stories. Witness Ted's contorted quest for “the One” and a perfect family, Lily's doubts about past decisions, or Robin's sacrifices in the name of future possibilities.

The main new characteristic of the way we assemble our identities is that we have more flexibility and we reflect more on the process. Following Barney's advice on how to boost our career (“The Possimpible”) we might call this modern phenomenon of human identity construction “Reflexibility.”

Reflexibility

The sociologist Anthony Giddens states that identity construction in our modern times has become a strongly reflexive project, which he sees as something inevitable. When the idea of a pre-given core self was given up and some people started to question the influence of God in their life, the task of the designing of self was put in our own hands.

Giddens sees the reflexive project of the self as a way to resolve the uncertainty about our self and our place in the world stemming from the rather fragmented and chaotic experience of being. By constantly constructing a consistent life story in which the past, present, and future come together we get a coherent sense of ourselves. This story is continually under revision with the progressing of our lives, until our death. In the last few decades our society has undergone rapid and radical changes due to technological developments. Because of that we should add something to Giddens's theory.