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Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between
Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein
By
Published: Oct 27, 2009
Category:
Psychology
I asked the 7.5-year-old, “Do you know the meaning of life?”
“Sure,” she said, giving me that Oh, Daddy look. “It’s obvious. Nobody knows. And then you die.”
Which pretty much nails it, don’t you think? At least, that’s what Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein would knowledge as an extremely valid position in Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between, the third in their series of small books that explain big ideas through really stupid jokes.
Well, their books are a bit more than that. They’re stealth intellectual weapons, so fun to read you don’t notice they’re also feeding you a savvy, accurate history of philosophy. If you started your studies with Cathcart and Klein in Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, you know you came away both groaning (at the jokes) and smarter (thanks to the amusing instructional techniques of these aging Harvard Philosophy majors.) If you missed it, here’s the cheat sheet:
I found their follow-up — Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington: Understanding Political Doublespeak Through Philosophy and Jokes — modestly fun but too worldly. So I’m thrilled they’re back with the ultimate fun topic: death.
We are, they note, “the only creatures who comprehend that we are going to die and we are also the only creatures who can imagine living forever.” This, they explain, is why there are so many jokes about death — our double consciousness terrifies us. And, of course, death has not only spawned philosophical investigation, it’s the bottom line of organized religion — which the authors define as nothing more complex as a ‘shared immortality system”.
They consult Freud, Jung and Woody Allen. They republish a spate of New Yorker cartoons. They summarize Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, which is quite a favor, as it is “the existential approximation of a near-death experience”. They grapple with Tillich, Wittgenstein and the Buddha on eternity as an endless Now. They bounce from the Greeks (Plato, “the Godfather of Soul”) to Zombies, from cloning to gut instinct. And when they have to put their chips down, they make a shrewd choice and go with William James.
And, of course, there are jokes. Including the one about the hippo:
Heidegger and a Hippo stroll up to the Pearly Gates, and Saint Peter says, “Listen, we’ve only got room for one more today. Whoever gives me the best answer to “What is the meaning of life?” gets in.
Heidegger says, “To think Being itself requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of things and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.”
But before the hippo can grunt one word, Saint Peter says to him, “Today’s your lucky day, Hippy!”
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