Piglet And Immanuel Kant And Paranoo

“A paranoid is someone who knows little of what’s going on” (William S. Burroughs). This quote by William S. Burroughs describes Piglet, a small and frightened character from Winnie-the-Pooh, perfectly. More often than not, Piglet is remembered for his paranoia, but where does his paranoia stem from? Piglet is also often found walking Pooh through thoughts and actions with a series of questions, but why does he decide this is the best way to teach Pooh about the world? Piglet is derived from two main philosophers: Socrates and Kant. Piglet helps Pooh discover the world on his own through asking questions, just like Socrates, and the pig and the philosopher both believed they truly knew nothing. On the other hand, Piglet chooses to do what is …show more content…
Exhibiting pieces of both philosophers’ ideas, piglet matches best with Socrates and Immanuel Kant. Socrates was a daring and odd man, and piglet was a surprisingly daring and odd Winnie-the-Pooh character. The two exhibited many similar characteristics, but there are three that are the most striking. First, the physical resemblance is striking. Jostein Gaarder describes Socrates in Sophie’s World, “We know for certain that [Socrates] was extremely ugly. He was potbellied, and had bulging eyes and a snub nose. But inside he was said to be ‘perfectly delightful’” (63). Not only is piglet a potbelly pig, but he also has a snout resembling a human snub nose. They bore very similar features to each other, the most an animal and a human could have, and thus they looked very similar. Second, both Socrates and Piglet realized they knew nothing. Socrates was a true philosopher, one that felt unsettled by the prospect that they knew nothing and instead sought to change it. “A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little” (Gaarder 67). Philosophy only came to …show more content…
First, Piglet and Kant share similar ideals of the Law of Causality, as Kant hated Hume and everything Hume stood for, so he wrote an entire response to Hume’s ideas that we couldn’t prove causality. “…if a judgment agrees with an object, then all judgments about the same object must also agree among one another, and thus the objective validity of the judgment of experience signifies nothing else but its necessary universal validity” (Pierris). Ultimately, Kant determines through the idea of experimental judgement that if one observation is true then all other observations have to be true to one another, so human reason does in fact understand the Law of Causality. While Piglet never says that phrase, he makes many observations and holds that they will continue to be true. “Then suddenly [Piglet] remembered a story which Christopher Robin had told him about a man on a desert island who had written something in a bottle and thrown it in the sea; and Piglet thought that if he wrote something in a bottle and threw it in the water, perhaps somebody would come and rescue him!” (Milne 133). Here, Piglet truly believes that if he does what the man in the story did that the same outcome will happen to him. This directly relates to Kant’s beliefs on the observed world and expected outcomes. As he had explained above, all observations are universalizable, and Piglet follows exactly that logic as