Pooh and the Philosophers

John Tyerman Williams

Methuen, London, 1995 ISBN 0 7493 2070 2

Abstract

This book is a humorous introduction to philosophy and discussion of philosophy using a running joke that Winnie-the-Pooh anticipated all major philosophical theories. The book is a history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the present day showing at each stage how various Pooh stories can be symbolically interpreted to be explanations of the philosophy in question. Unfortunately the quality of the analogies are very mixed and can sometimes be more tenuous and laborious than amusing.

There seems to have been an explosion of easy introductions to philosophy. Readers and Writers comic-book style ‘For Beginners’ series now includes Derrida, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato, Sartre, Saussure, Foucault, Chomsky, Heidegger and Wittgenstein as well as having a book just on Philosophy. Sophie’s World is now available as a CD-ROM game, and John Tyerman William’s Pooh and the Philosophers is yet another original angle on philosophy presenting a history of philosophy via symbolic interpretations of Winnie-the-Pooh stories.

The running joke of the book is that Pooh anticipated all major philosophical theories and commented on them in various non-literal ways in his stories; each chapter provides the interpretation for the particular philosophy under discussion. Here is an example of Pooh on Aristotle.

The first thing we notice is that Pooh assumes that the effect - buzzing - has a cause, something that makes it happen. This is precisely what Aristotle called an Efficient Cause (‘efficient’ meaning ‘having an effect’). Secondly, he concludes that in this instance, bees are the Efficient Cause of buzzing, because the buzzing is the effect of their action… So in a few short, clear and entertaining paragraphs, Winnie-the-Pooh gives us Aristotle’s logic, two of his four Causes, and his basically teleological approach.

We get nearly 200 pages of being told that Piglet’s Anxiety is an example of Heidegger’s Being-towards-Death, that Eeyore’s party is a form of Nietzsche’s ‘Ass Festival’ from Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, and ‘How to Catch a Woozle’ is a commentary on Kant’s theory of phenomena. Some interpretations are better than others and unfortunately in places the explanations are so tortuous that the joke is lost.

Pooh and the Philosophers can be amusing, but overall it promises more than it delivers and there are three reasons for this. Firstly, as an introduction to philosophy it fails by in places assuming the reader is familiar with the philosophy referred to. Those who don’t know philosophy but who are using the book as a sort of gentle education might be disappointed. Where the jokes assume some familiarity with the original theories the effect is rather like that of football jokes assuming some knowledge about football (for example jokes with a punchline "… and I said he could if he played in goal for Southampton!" will rarely be funny for someone ignorant of football). Secondly the interpretations are stretched to such as degree the reader is left thinking anything could have been used as the reference point: the author may as well have started by assuming a cooking book, copy of the Beano or pack of cards contained hidden comments on philosophy and decided to write a book to bring out the symbolism. One particularly awkward fact is the problem that Pooh was actually a character in a series of stories written by A.A. Milne, hence really it is Milne who is the Great Philosopher, a problem William’s frequently discusses but never answers. Thirdly the title suggests Pooh somehow meeting philosophers and having discussions with them, which might have been a better idea. Part of the attraction of Pooh is his naive simplicity and to actually make him a character in the book with stories which include philosophical problems may have been both a better mechanism for bringing out some simple explanations of the various philosophers ideas, and may have made the book suitable for the children’s market.

The author might like to consider Paddington for his next book. In the scene where he is at Paddington station with a big suitcase he was obviously showing that he agreed with Wittgenstein that "the world is all that is the case".