The Six Bunny Wunnies and Their Layover in Anderson, Indiana

You also left out The Six Bunny-Wunnies, Their Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith, and Its Reception by Certain Neo-Hegelians, with an Excursus by J. Holbo on the relation of the preceding to recent trends in analytic philosophy and libertarianism, etc.

Russell Arben Fox 08.20.16 at 6:52 pm
There was endless wisdom in the work of Schulze, circa 1960s-1980s.

According to Wikipedia, the Best Buy format was very popular.

from one of the links:

The Bunny Wunny series is a fictional book series in the Peanuts comic strip. The books are written by Miss Helen Sweetstory. The Bunny Wunny books are particularly enjoyed by Snoopy.

Was aware of the main Peanuts characters, of course, and occasionally (if I may date myself) read the strip in the newspaper (I mean the hard-copy newspaper), but I don’t believe I’d heard of this Bunny Wunny series. Which may be b/c it somewhat predates my occasional reading of the strip.

p.s. on second thought, probably did run across refs to the Bunny Wunny bks and forgot. That seems more likely.

Charlie Brown, of course, runs away screaming.

The bureaucrat can muster no more than a sigh in this recent languagehat post:

The bureaucrat sighs as he adds up another column.
Who can possibly still be riding so many horses?
This is just as boring as his previous life was.
Why did he ask to be sent back to what he already knew?

Isn’t the kick-the-football bit the prototype of the eternal R?

Graffiti style:

https://flic.kr/p/tWuu6w

Thanks for keeping track of my crimes, citizen ZM.

Yes, specifically: either a closet atheist or an unconscious atheist in denial.

Obviously a contentious claim, but not absurd. The man literally says that truth is a state of becoming and that faith is becoming rather than being a Christian. Not a stretch, arguably a logical entailment even.

These contrarian crimes have got nothing on my claim in another thread that Ferante might be very good but not among the greatest. I’m in witness protection for that one.

Personally, the only kind of “what comes next” I can think about involves a chance to “try again”. I don’t know how that would work for the rest of y’all, but I so rarely do. Anyway that’s what I’m holding out for.

Yan: Many people seem to think Spinoza was an atheist also. He wasn’t a Presbyterian, that’s true.

Yankee 22, the Spinoza comparison is interesting, but my claim about Kierkegaard’s a tougher case because he presents himself as a Christian, in contrast to Spinoza who gives us an abstract philosophical theism that doesn’t even pretend to resemble that of everyday monotheism.

But to admit he’s no Presbyterian is to vastly underemphize his weirdness. He’s a Christian who says that a pagan worshipping an idol with true faith can be a true Christian, making doctrinal content irrelevant: in his words, it’s only the how not the what that matters. By that extraordinary logic, a worshipper of reason in true faith is a “real” Christian, or a worshipper of humanity, or of the self, and so on. Hell, why not even a devout, subjectively existing in the passion of faith, Satanist?

LFC 22, he’s a really funny, viciously witty write, as in that passage. But that one also has a weird ugly classism to it, since he concludes that noise is a way in which manual laborers violate the rights of intellectuals to uninterrupted thought.

His relevance here is that Nietzsche’s mature philosophy is posed directly against Schopenhauer, but Peanuts has important similarities to Schopenhauer: a pessimistic view of life and human nature in which Charlie brownish grief is inevitable, in which humans are essentially unbearable to each other, and the only good is to lessen each other’s suffering as much as possible.

Nietzsche identifies that kind of ethics as nihilist, sees it as the core of both Christianity and Buddhism, and constructs his entire philosophy around its overcoming. So it’s unlikely Peanuts is Nietzschean on any plausible reading. (Consider too how fitting it seems that the strip has become so embedded with the Christian Christmas story in the cultural psyche–because the New Testament is in many ways it’s philosophical core: suffering and mercy, that’s all there is.)

@ZM
Yes it’s humorous, but there is a pessimistic (or is it more a stoic? anyway not ‘happy’) undertone. Lucy is continually unbearable to Charlie Brown, continually tells him he’s worthless and incompetent and a loser etc., a self-image he internalizes. Schroeder the pianist is basically a narcissist, Lucy is a nasty jerk, Linus is a regressive infantile mess, Charlie Brown is a latter-day Sisyphus whose life is one defeat after another. The only halfway ‘normal’ character is a dog who thinks he’s flying a Sopwith Camel* in WW1.

[*or whatever the damn airplane is called]

Shorter version: for K, the “correct” object of faith is faith itself.

I mean, would a cartoon version of Lord of the Flies made with Peanuts characters really be that much of a stretch?

Holbo 34, as I suggested earlier, I don’t think Charlie Brown works as the last man. The implied author of Peanuts sides with CB, so he cannot be presenting him to us as a negative ideal, that is, as an ideal in contrast to which he thinks there is a higher, achievable type. The lesson of CB is that higher types do not and cannot exist. CB is not the last man, but everyman, humanity as such. Not the last but the first and only.

He represents not a critique but an affirmation: CB in fact passes the test. He not only wills the return of his existence, he wills it in the exact same form. He knows, and we know he knows, and Schulz wants us to know that he knows, that Lucy will pull the football again. He pretends to “hope” otherwise, but every event in the strip, every event in his life and–most importantly–his every reaction to those events (always a sigh, never gnashing teeth and cursing, or at least never convincingly, rarely surprise or anger) tells us he knows that his life will continue exactly as it has, and he chooses to live it anyway.

He hasn’t passed the test in the abstract, but in practice. The strip consists of the same events, over and over, and his response should be taken literally: grief is good, it is better than nothing. He is, in his way, a true overman, since he defies N’s idealistic belief that “man would rather have the void for a purpose than be void of purpose”. He is free of purpose, like a stoic who achieves ataraxia without needing to believe in reason. He may be a Camusian sisysphus, or a Simone Weil.

Yes, maybe Shulz is preoccupied with the fate of the small man. Because he loves him, because he sides with him, and because he believes we are all him, and that the overman and the small man are ultimately one and the same (it occurs to me that this is the heart of John Williams’ novel Stoner, too). That makes him no more a Nietzschean than Nietzsche’s preoccupation with nihilism makes him a nihilist.

ZM @37
I didn’t mention Lord of the Flies; Yan did.

John 38, Although I’ve apologized and had assumed you’d accepted the apology, my rude comment from my first post eternally recurs in yours. I don’t quite get your comments about it, perhaps you intend to reverse the charge against me? No matter, I’m happy to continue playing nice.

On N, I think we’re talking past each other, you debating the details of how Nietzsche maps onto Peanuts, and me debating the value of those details, however they’re mapped. You’re reading Peanuts through Nietzsche’s concepts, but I’m asking: does Schultz value those concepts in the same way, is reading through rather than in comparison and contrast to N’s concepts justified? Whether CB is the last man or the small man, you see him through Nietzsche’s eyes as what must be, with difficulty and regrettably, affirmed in the eternal return. But in doing so you fail to see CB through CB’s own eyes and, likely, through Schultz’s eyes. We see the Peanuts universe from outside, from N’s perspective, and in doing so from the start defuse the possibility that Peanuts’ perspective might deeply challenge rather than confirm N’s universe.

On the matter of our different interpretations of N, I suspect they’re bassed on rather foundational interpretative claims that are too deep to fruitfully debate here, but I’d at least insist we both have rather eccentric takes in comparison to the scholarly consensus or norm. (That, contrary to what ZM seemed to imply, it’s not my takes alone that are provocative or highly controversial). Would you admit, for example, that your view that “Nietzsche thinks the overman and the small man are one and the same” is not a very common one among, probably an outrageous one to many, Nietzsche scholars? Not wrong for that reason, of course, though I certainly disagree.

I have a sense that our deep differences here are in part–as with Kierkegaard–a reflection of which texts and topics we take to be central. You seem to give a lot of weight to roughly middle period works like GS and Z whereas I find those most enlightening–as largely a critical philosophy only anticipating a positive project in the future–when read backward, in light of the later texts like BGE, GM, and especially TI, EH, and A.

On K: you accepted my interpretation that you’re rejecting premise 2 without discussing the further point I made: that such a rejection is incompatible with K’s constant stress on the how rather than the what and his very strong, provocative claim that subjectivity is truth. Do you think he’s inconsistent here, or that he only means what he says when you agree with him?

As for whether the temporal paradox is necessary to faith, I think your choice of text does too much work. It’s much more plausible when looking at Sickness Unto Death than, say, Philosophical Fragments or Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

But it’s curious that your support for the claim is a passage about the self that doesn’t mention either Christ’s incarnation, temporality/eternity, or reason, which were the issues of dispute. In any case, the statement that the self rests in the power that sustains it tells us nothing that excludes faith in self or reason–provided we are talking not just about any cult of self or reason, but one that conforms to K’s picture of the subjective relation of faith. Someone who has “faith” in K’s sense in relation to the self must see the self as something higher than his or her own self-understanding, as something that she evaluates as the greatest good and law not out of rational assessment of her particular qualities but out of faith, out of the need and demand for an absolute beyond rational comprehension or questioning. It would be no ordinary egoism, but one which distinguish a believed absolute self from the temporal one, and places the latter under the absolute authority of the former. (Perhaps Stirner or Fichte might approximate something like this…)

Let’s be blunt: K’s temporal paradox is not religious but philosophical, and just Kantianism: the absurd is that in knowledge of any object the absolute, the eternal, the Kantian thing in itself exist temporily, subjectively, as phenomenon. The self existing in the power that sustains it is just the self as subject of phenomenal experience existing in the power of the noumenal object which, qua noumenal and unknown, might well be anything, God, the devil, Descartes’ evil genius, a stack of turtles, or the Fichtean ego or Schopenhauer’s will.

The point of faith is precisely the Kantian, philosophical and in many respects anti-religious claim that “the power that sustains” is noumenal reality, thus by definition is unknown, inaccessible to reason, and necessarily both an object of faith and an undefinable object. (In Philosophical Fragments he calls it the “absolute paradox” of the “absolute unknown”, about as far from any kind of religious doctrinal conditions as you can get.)

If K were trying–and I see no evidence that he does–to give us a negatively determinate object of faith in the Cartesian fashion (instead of “god” is not attribute or finite, “god” is paradox, eternity in time, non-self, non-reason) he would fail by his own criteria to have faith, he would rely on reason to negatively delimit faith’s object, to know it rather than to believe it.

Of course K doesn’t think reason is the support of existence, but his point is that faith is the faith that there is something that supports our existence, and what object we choose to insert in that blank is where “subjectivity is truth” comes in: how we treat the object, not which object we choose, determines faith and non-faith. In the case of reason, as I explained in my earlier post, to believe that reason gives us access to the noumenal world, that it is not accidentally reality to truth but essentially so, is paradoxically to give up reason in relation to reason, to have faith in the foundational proposition that the rational is the real, even as upon that faith we establish all *other* claims through reason. The point is that the foundational claim about reason is made in faith, not from reason, in that way we treat reason as the support of existence, we believe, probably falsely, that it is so. But this belief is no more ridiculous to K than the belief that God is, for both are rationally absurd articles of faith about an absolutely unknowable noumenal world in itself.

Yan,

“Let’s be blunt: K’s temporal paradox is not religious but philosophical, and just Kantianism: the absurd is that in knowledge of any object the absolute, the eternal, the Kantian thing in itself exist temporily, subjectively, as phenomenon.

The self existing in the power that sustains it is just the self as subject of phenomenal experience existing in the power of the noumenal object which, qua noumenal and unknown, might well be anything, God, the devil, Descartes’ evil genius, a stack of turtles, or the Fichtean ego or Schopenhauer’s will.

…

The point is that the foundational claim about reason is made in faith, not from reason, in that way we treat reason as the support of existence, we believe, probably falsely, that it is so. But this belief is no more ridiculous to K than the belief that God is, for both are rationally absurd articles of faith about an absolutely unknowable noumenal world in itself.”

Can you establish Kierkegaarde is in fact asserting these things with quotes?

I feel like you are attributing something to Kierkegaarde which I find it very difficult to believe he is asserting.

You mention Descartes, my reading of Kierkegaarde is limited, but actually one thing I do happen to know about Kierkegaarde is he thought Descarte’s conclusion I Think Therefore I Am is a tautology — If you have an I doing something, the I exists. Necessarily.

He actually brings this up sort of in the passage we are disputing. He says existence is not the same as thinking.

I can’t really understand why you say belief in Descarte’s evil genius scenario can be in any way correlated with faith?

Isn’t the scenario taking Descartes into a place which is the opposite of faith?

It is a scenario that is specifically about very extreme doubt, not faith.

Its fresh in my mind since I commented about it the other day in relation to some Buffy fan fiction in a thread which reminded me of Descartes’ evil genius scenario.

Descartes uses reason to free him from the extreme doubt of the evil genius scenario — hence I Think Therefore I Am — so doesn’t this particular example actually highlight the different nature between faith and reason?

This is something that Kierkegaarde himself looks at in the text. The text is about objective kinds of reflection and subjective kinds of reflection, and he looks at how reason or objectivity can be security against madness.

“For this reason the objective way is convinced that it possesses a security that the subjective way does not have. It is of the opinion that it avoids the danger that lies in wait for the subjective way, and at its extreme this danger is madness.

In its view a solely subjective definition of truth make lunacy and truth indistinguishable. But by staying objective one avoids becoming a lunatic.

However, is not the absence of inwardness also lunacy? It is true that subjective reflection turns inward, but in this inward deepening their is truth. Less we forget the subject, the individual, is an existing self, and existing is a process of becoming.

…

…thinking and being are not automatically one and the same. If the existing person could actually be outside himself, the truth would then be something concluded for him.

However for the truly existing person, passion, not thought, is existence at its very highest: true knowing pertains essentially to existence, to a life of decision and responsibility. Only ethical and ethical religious knowing is essential knowing. Only truth that matters to me, to you, is of significance. ”

Kierkegaarde clearly sees subjectivity as important — but you can see he specifies “ethical and ethical religious” forms of knowledge as being the only essential forms.

So I find it really hard to follow your thinking about the text.

How is Kierkegaarde in this text we are looking at saying that reason, or Satan worship, or Descartes evil genius are examples of faith?

I can see what Kierkegaarde means with the example he gives of a person who lives in a “pagan land” praying to an “idol” (apart from its very obviously outdated now) — but I can’t see how this applies to reason, Satan worship, or Descartes evil genius?

@ZM
Actually that was my fault, I was reading too quickly, missed your attribution to Yan. No problem.
p.s. Just saw this headline in WaPo: woman who was the real-life inspiration for the Peanuts character ‘the little red-haired girl’ has died. (I didn’t copy the link.)

Incidentally, anyone who thinks Peanuts was just humorous needs to read the strips from the 50s. Some of those comics are so dark that I’d almost hesitate recommending them for children, except that I doubt many children would grasp how dark they were.

The one where the kids are playing thermonuclear bomb, for example. Or the one where Charlie Brown lists his war comics (revolutionary war, civil war, WWI, WWII, korean war), and then comments that he “isn’t looking forward to the next one.”

Or the very first strip, with its classic ending: “Good ol’ Charlie Brown! How I hate him!”

Doug Hudson @48
Interesting re the strips from the ’50s.
The fear of global nuclear war in the ’50s and its intersections w culture (low, high, and medium/midbrow) is something that’s been much written about, so I guess it’s not too surprising, but still interesting.

dSmith @49 has won this week’s Commenting On The Internet Challenge. Thank you for your interest, and please check back regularly for the announcement of our next contest.