In Rick and Morty, season 03, episode 03, we encounter a conversation between Rick and a Therapist. Rick tries to explain how he got himself into a situation where he became a pickle and went to an adventure. In that scene we encounter in what seems to be a conversation with a distinct Nietzschean flavor.
Therapist : Why didn’t you want to come here?
Rick : Because I don’t respect therapy, because I’m a scientist. Because I invent, transform, create, and destroy for a living, and when I don’t like something about the world, I change it. And I don’t think going to a rented office in a strip mall to listen to some agent of averageness explain which words mean which feelings has ever helped anyone do anything.
I think it’s helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking, which is a state of mind [burps] we value in the animals we eat but not something I want for myself.
I’m not a cow.
I’m a pickle — when I feel like it.
So…you asked.
Therapist : Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness.
You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse.
And I think it’s because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it’s your mind within your control… You chose to come here. You chose to talk, to belittle my vocation, just as you chose to become a pickle.
You are the master of your universe, and yet you are dripping with rat blood and feces, your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I’m bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it’s not an adventure. There’s no way to do it so wrong, you might die.
It’s just work.
And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people… well, some people would rather die.
Each of us gets to choose.
-[Watch beeps]
-That’s our time. I’m going to give you guys my card and hope to hear from you again. And if you have any friends or family that eat poop and would like to stop, give them my number.
Rick turned himself into a pickle. He did it because he wanted to avoid a meeting with a therapist. In therapy, Rick mentions, we talk about feelings, by changing how we look at them we might alter our perception of events and then feel more comfortable about them.
Rick does not believe in feeling comfortable because for him it’s a reaction that comes after feeling panic. Rick does not want to have this endless circle of repeating life reactions altering between panic and comfort.
“if a lion could speak, we could not understand him”
Wittgenstein
Rick refers to how we think about food, about cows. Wittgenstein, in his work comes to view language only as a game which is shared in the context of a similar social group. Language, Wittgenstein says, is nothing more than referring to the same things by a group with the same ability of capturing things from reality, which is only sensory data, as David Hume suggested long time ago.
A lion has quite a different world experience, without morals, without consequences, without consciousness (choices), only instinct. Therefore the lion cannot describe such a world to us humans. Because of our brains, we humans experience it differently. The lion never had morals because he’s not capable of having any.
Rick is talking about being human, having not only the capability of having morals, but also ignoring them, transcending beyond good and evil. The same as the lion the cow is a metaphor of its opposite. The lion is a predator and the cow is prey, Lotka–Volterra. This makes their world quite different, we associate lion with courage and excitement and cow with ignorance and in Rick’s case panic.
Rick does not want comfort for himself because he sees man as something that could be quite different from what we think about our cows. Wittgenstein would say that anything we associate with cows is nonsense (sinnlos), because if we could talk to a cow we would not understand it. Our assumptions about the world always take our human form, cannot be otherwise. To say it differently Rick’s approach see’s people who panic, as people who got involved with their weird stories they tell themselves about their food, they do it for comfort, they tell themselves stories to feel good about themselves.
The therapist is Rick’s opposite, while he is willing to live side by side with danger and adventure to experience life in a way he calls human, the therapist makes it obvious that it is not something that is meant for everyone. Most people want to be comfortable, go to work, “repairing and maintaining” instead of “Inventing, transforming, creating, and destroying”. The therapist sees Rick as a sickness, something ugly. Rick and the therapist have opposite views about what we call good and evil, that is a choice, maybe our greatest freedom if we only dare to take it.
The approach towards life of the therapist is exactly what Nietzsche and Thomas Mann warned us about: to give in to a too comfortable life, to give up all true freedom and to lock ourselves in a state of distant reflection from life, the Buddhist approach. For Rick meaningful change is possible only if the world is affected by his actions, in the end only by physical action. In the reality that we share with each other, expression only takes place in a form, this is what we call power.
Because of the nature of our physical and physiognomical world as humans we will experience growth, power and change only in the process of one form which takes the place of the other, this phenomena Rick calls Invention, transformation, creation and destruction.