Heidegger And A Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between

So Heidegger and a hippo stroll up to the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter says, "Listen, we've only got room for one more today. So whoever of the two of you gives me the best answer to the question 'What is the meaning of life?' gets to come in."

And Heidegger says, "To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings 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!"

Apparently that is a direct quote from Heidegger. Don't know how much it confused Saint Peter, but I too would have second thoughts about admitting into my home someone who is in the habit of speaking that way. Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein's book Heidegger And A Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates  [H&H from here onwards] ends on that note.

Cathcart and Klein, both Harvard philosophy grads, have written this book to explore some questions that have confounded humans through the ages. Patterned as an ongoing conversation between the authors and Daryl Frumkin, the neighborhood plumber, the book attempts to explain the meaning of life and death while drawing upon the wisdom of philosophers, folksy jokes, New Yorker cartoons and of course, Woody Allen.

At the heart of our Life and Death anxiety lies the wishful thinking that author William Saroyan expressed in a letter written to his survivors: "Everybody has got to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case."  H&H takes readers through the much debated but hitherto mostly unanswered questions like the meaning of life, eternity, immortality, religious myths, spirituality, suicide, near death experiences, cloning, the reach and limits of bio-technology as a means of prolonging life and the inevitability of death. It is not surprising therefore that the first chapter of the book opens with the no-nonsense declaration, Dead! Whatcha Gonna Do About It?  Not much, it is clear by the end of the book, except to laugh occasionally and come to terms with life's grand finale, an outcome we try to keep at bay most of our lives but have no way of finally avoiding.  

Whether readers more familiar with serious philosophy than I am will find a meaningful connection between formal philosophical thoughts and the supporting jokes, I do not know. But I found the humor refreshing for the most part. It reminded me of another book I read long ago. Humorist Leo Rosten took the same approach to explaining the subtle nuances of Yiddish words and expressions in his hilarious dictionary, The Joys of Yiddish. The New Yorker cartoons in H&H are particularly apt. Occasionally, the relentless light hearted banter is a bit jarring. I was initially somewhat irked by the authors' propensity for assigning flippant nick names to philosophers.

Martin Heidegger: Marty, Heidi
Aristotle: Ari
Sigmund Freud: Siggy
Arthur Schopenhauer: Schopey, Schopster, Artie, Schopmeister

Woody Allen on the other hand, becomes Allen Stewart Konigsberg (his real name) for a brief period.

Daryl Frumkin too on his side of the conversation, is given to repetitive and predictable incredulity. For example, after being informed of what an assortment of wise men have said about the milestones and mysteries of life, the plumber is prone to judging some of them as follows:

Søren Kierkegaard: a few Danishes short of a coffee break
Arthur Schopenhauer: a few breadcrumbs short of a schnitzel
Plato: a few Doric columns short of a Parthenon

You get the idea - a running gag you get used to after a while. I enjoyed reading H&H. But I find it hard to review the book in my customary, descriptive fashion. So I will leave it at that. You can check out what others have said on the Amazon page. Also, you can listen in on an interview with the authors on the Forum Network.  

(Thanks to Rebecca Hunt, Associate Editor at Penguin Books, for sending me the book for review)

Comments

[Andrew R.]

Sounds like an interesting book -- I've always found Heidegger a mystifying thinker. Plus, I'm not crazy about his quietist conformity to the rise of Nazism. But if the book helps as a way into to his thought, then I'll check it outl.

[Ruchira]

No, Andrew. You won't get much insight into Heidegger's "quietist conformity" with Nazism in this book. This one's about life and death in general and it contains some of his unintelligible (to me) musings on these topics. But there are other philosophers quoted here whose reflections on these matters are not so opaque.

[Alex Leibowitz]

Sounds like the quote means, if you want to think about being, you need to figure out some way of approaching it that doesn't make it a ground (principle, cause?) for beings. Relating the last clause to the rest of it seems tricky, but maybe it's meant to convey that metaphysics has always taken being as the cause of beings, and that this has been a mistake. (Now if you substitute in the term God for beings, he would be saying that in order to understand God, you have to stop thinking of him as the creator of the world.) Simplified a bit, it sounds like the old "ontological difference": don't explain being in terms of beings -- don't make being into a being. And there may be some motivation for it: suppose that being explains the existence of beings. If being is itself a kind of being, then presumably it exists, and then it must somehow explain its own existence. Now if we take the explanation to be causal (if it makes sense to speak that way) then being would either have to be the cause of itself, which is absurd, or there would have to be something else which causes it to exist -- but if one being was bad enough, two beings each make the other superfluous. (This does not seem unrelated to the third-man argument, on the face of it.) So whatever we mean by being, we want to conclude either that it isn't a thing -- that it doesn't exist -- or that it isn't a principle or cause that explains the existence of other beings. Now maybe you'll say, so much the worse for "being" -- but you do have these puzzles when you take the idea that there is something called being seriously.

[Alex Leibowitz]

This book must be a sequel to "Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar".

[Ruchira]

That's right, Alex. This one is the sequel. I haven't read "Plato & Platypus." Have you?

And thanks for explaining "Being & being." My sympathies still lie with St. Peter:-)

[M]

i think a great introduction to heidegger is his essay "the question concerning technology". It's, like, 20 pages, worth reading.

it's not a great overview of his philosphy, but it has remained relavant to current issues...deals with the interplay between "technology" and how it impacts our sense of world, self. i put "technology" in quotes since he spends a good part of the essay defining the word. "the question concerning technology" and "the myth of sisyphus" by camus are my two favorite essays.

the trick with heidegger is to focus, less on specific sentences, and more on the paragraphs. i've always had to plow through a few sentences before the overall meanings sort of kick in. and he plays with this...he asks a question...and then spends 20 pages looking at the history of each word in the question. so that initially, he's elliptical, hard to follow, but by the end, it's a little easier to absorb. i've always thought of it as writing by gestalt...the overall picture brings meaning to the individual bits. So, read and read and by the end, maybe something will seem interesting, worth pondering. thats my favorite way of going about it.

but oy vey, the controversy. heidegger was a nazi. and disowned his mentor, husserl. appalling.

nietzsche hated women. the founding fathers owned slaves. jesus never actually existed. history is replete with great thinkers who lived suspect lives. most great artists were awful humans.

not that great works are a justification for lunacy. others have achieved great things without the pathos. tycho brahe the astronomer: brilliant, fairly well behaved. robert hooke, key player in the scientific revolution...seemed like an introvert and genuinely nice guy. Leibniz! Co-inventor of the calculus. come on! calculus! that's serious business. brought into the world by a gentle eccentric.

we never know who to read and i think it's perfect that the candidate are less than satisfactory . heidegger...he had respect during the 80's academic scene...but that turned around in the 90's, he's out of favor, now just a cartoon.

i say find his essay: :question concerning technology". he's still there, in that way...same warmings, fears, excstaties.he hasn't been dessicated yet by the academic malcontents who blow smoke into his bearace. he still sees people creating new forms of blindness, new ways of hiding what's obvious: that w'ere trapped in glass jars. culture is glass jars and we're the twitching bugs inside of them, hitting walls, tapping glass.

we want out of this.

[Ruchira]

M, I always take you seriously even though you are given to pulling my leg! So may be I will give the technology essay a try.

In a moment of overarching curiosity (or ambition) I had got myself a copy of Heidegger's "Being and Time" a few years ago. And believe me, I gave it an honest try for a few days. Then it struck me that I may not have enough time left in my life to get a hang of the "gestalt."

Camus, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish altogether - him I understand.

[M]

no, being in time is overly dense, hard to follow. "question concerning technology" has a lot of his trademark writing style, i.e. difficult phrasing, but i do think he deals with themes that have become only more relevant over the years. (i miss spelled a lot of words in that last post...i have to make a rule, no posting before coffee).

[Lee Braver]

Nice parsing, Alex!

I would recommend the selection, "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics" in Krell's _Basic Writings_ as a very clear beginning point. It anticipates many aspects of Kuhn by some 30 years, so if you know Kuhn's work, that gives you a real foothold in the essay.

If you'll excuse a shameless plug, I wrote an essay-for-essay reader's guide to Krell's anthology: _Heidegger's Later Writings: A Reader's Guide_ [http://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Later-Writings-Readers-Guides/dp/0826439675/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266334464&sr=8-1]. I try very hard to cut through the jargon to express his ideas as clearly as possible.

Good luck--he's worth the effort!

[Dean C. Rowan]

Speaking of essays and Camus, M, take a look at Fanny Howe's list here. I have to add that technology piece to the shortlist. I've been meaning to read it for years. As for difficult prose, I tend to approach it as poetry, which is per se difficult and, more importantly, useless.

[M]

i will definitely check out the list, thanks for the link.