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Pop Culture Project
I Am Thin, Therefore I Am
Pop culture today places a huge emphasis on being thin. You see it everywhere: in the news, in magazines, on television, on the Internet, and any other kind of media. We are constantly being bombarded with images of impossibly thin women and lean, muscular men, while at the same time, advertisements for diet products are at an all-time high. The combination of these two things, always being thrown at us in the media we see, can lead many people to believe that these models and actors, who are paid to be thin (and often airbrushed for print media to look more thin than they really are), are the norm and the ideal for society. If we want to fit in and be normal, media tells us, we must be thin or we are irrelevant. Society loves thin people, while it ignores everyone else. If you want to be a part of this society, you have to be thin….at least that's the message we are being given. You even have to take extreme measures to be thin, dieting as radically as possible to achieve impossible standards….today's pop culture message really does put the "die" in "diet."
This message of being thin can be more closely examined using the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes believed humans to be made up of the thinking substance (the mind) and the extended substance (the body) (Russell, 73). The pop...
The thinking substance is taking in all of these messages about being thin and considering ways to make that happen, including extreme dieting. The body does not like extreme dieting, and rebels against it because it is unhealthy. As the body gets less healthy through the dieting, the mind starts to consider that maybe this isn't the best idea, but then it sees those images of thin models again, and determines to push the body to even more extremes to fit in.
Descartes's hyperbolic doubt can also be used to examine this situation. With hyperbolic doubt, Descartes puts everything he knows into doubt, in order to determine what is really true. This can be done with the modern message of being thin. By taking everything we know about diet and exercise and health and putting it into doubt, we can gradually eliminate the things that don't make sense and the things that aren't true, and come to discover what really is true. This may take some research, but if one does this, one will eventually discover that most actresses and models are not really as thin as they appear, the ones who are not healthy, and that the body requires some fat to survive. A happy medium regarding body image and being thin could be achieved by using hyperbolic doubt…
Works Cited
Cottingham, John. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. New York: Simon and Brown, 2011.
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