What's neat about this is it gives you access to all sorts of interesting topics that don't normally come up in philosophy class. The middle ground is a community of mutually supportive individuals.Īnd what Nick thinks is that the new use of 'awesome' and 'suck' are attempts trying to pick out the values and disvalues associated with supporting and squelching option 3.You could solve that anarchy through strict conformity, but then you lose individuality.You could have an anarchy of individuals each doing their own thing.(I didn't mention the Kantian stuff explicitly, but it helped to shape some of my comments.) I taught it like this: Here's stuff I know because I've read the book and because I’m friends with Nick and know about his larger project: in the background for Nick is some Kantian aesthetics, about how aesthetic life encourages the harmony between free individuals. To 'suck' is to smack down such social openings for no good reason, and thus squelch the mutual development of such a community.To be 'game' or 'down' is to respond positively to such social openings and participate.To be 'awesome' is to create such social opening in order to nurture such community.In the background is Nick's view that we're trying to create a special kind of community, of mutually appreciative individuals, who appreciate and support each other for their individuality. Sometimes, though, we break script, in order to create a 'social opening': a moment in which we're off script, and can interact as creative individuals, and appreciate each others' individuality. We're on social autopilot for most of the day. His basic theory is: we are typically on role-based social scripts. Here, if you want it, is my lesson plan for that: Reading the book definitely enriched my teaching, but everything you need to know is in the Aeon piece. This piece later spawned a book, On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck. I taught Nick Riggle's Aeon piece on defining 'awesome', 'down',' and 'suck'. Maybe one of you can come up with a better lesson plan for this.īut the “awesome' and “suck” class was fantastic, and students were far more into it than I expected. Also comparing three subtly different definitions of the same account is not a great idea for intro. Still, the discussion of 'asshole' did not go well, due to the (retrospectively now obvious) total overload of material. The “asshole” part involved comparing Aaron James’ account of an asshole, Eric Schwitzgebel’s account of a jerk, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ account of an asshole – using YouTube videos and Aeon pieces and blog posts to try to make it manageable. For the rest of “Bullshit and Assholes” week, I was going to cover the notions of “asshole”, “jerk”, “awesome”, and “suck”.

Nick riggle on being awesome