The True Heir of Plato

st suited to illuminate our age.

To speak truthfully and insightfully today you must have a sense of the absurdity of human life and endeavour. Past attempts to construct grand and noble theories about human history and destiny have collapsed. […]

The satirical cartoon world is essentially a philosophical one because to work it needs to reflect reality accurately by abstracting it, distilling it and then presenting it back to us, illuminating it more brightly than realist fiction can.

That’s why it is no coincidence that the most insightful and philosophical cultural product of our time is a comic cartoon, and why its creator, Matt Groening, is the true heir of Plato, Aristotle and Kant.

You can say the same kind of things for any piece of culture. Indeed whole libraries are full of books saying this kind of thing about novels, or about films. Any worthwhile art says things about life which you can fit into a piece of philiosophy if you want to – though it has a similar deadening effect as explaining what a piece of poetry is trying to say.

A commenter on Baggini’s piece mentions “The Parables of Peanuts“, which analysed the Snoopy and Charlie Brown cartoons. Could there be a clearer warning of where this kind of talk could lead? And let’s not forget “The Tao of Pooh“. No doubt we’ll soon be getting (maybe we already have?) “The Wisdom of Homer”.